Advice for testing Jupyter front-end extension?

[Titus Barik]

Hi all,

Is there any advice or guidance for how to test Jupyter (classical) front-end extensions? For instance, I'm not sure how to start and isolate a Jupyter instance just for testing that doesn't inherit properties or configuration from the shared or user's home directory.

Thanks,

Titus

--
Titus Barik, PE <ti...@barik.net>

[Nicholas Bollweg]

Using the notebook's own base class is a great place to start:

https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/blob/master/notebook/tests/launchnotebook.py

It does a number of things to ensure you have a clean setting, like populating HOME. It's harder to not include things that are installed into the environment in which the test is running, but with virtual/conda envs (or something like tox) you can be pretty sure.

Once you have a server: the notebook tests are currently moving away from js-based tests towards python tests with selenium directly

https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/blob/master/notebook/tests/selenium/test_save_as_notebook.py

I have been using Robot Framework and it's selenium wrapper a lot recently for testing JupyterLab, but it could certainly test classic:

http://robotframework.org/

http://robotframework.org/SeleniumLibrary/

Here are some (admittedly pretty crazy) tests:

https://github.com/deathbeds/jyve/blob/master/tests/acceptance/Kernels.robot

https://github.com/deathbeds/jupyterlab-fonts/blob/master/tests/acceptance/Editor.robot

And some of the output, which includes lovely screenshots and timings:

https://deathbeds.github.io/jyve/log.html

If you want to go the extra meta-mile, a new Robot kernel was released this week:

https://pypi.org/project/robotkernel/