Is there a way to get Appium to attempt to uninstall a driver 'only if' they exist?

[tking16]

Our Appium framework is handled by a Makefile which installs on a machine after every deployment. I'm struggling a bit with adding the appium driver install and uninstall commands for 2.0. We already have a clean command that wipes all the node_modules, when I added node $(APPIUM_PATH) driver uninstall xcuitest and node $(APPIUM_PATH) driver uninstall uiautomator2 the command would error if they weren't installed. My question is, is there a way for the command to carry on gracefully should it not find the appium drivers?

I also have some trouble installing via the Makefile, but don't want to make this question too long.

[RSM-SBA]

on mac you can pipe a true

appium driver uninstall xcuitests || true

[jlipps]

With the new version of the Appium 2 beta you can also just manage dependencies as node modules in your project and not use the Appium CLI to manage them. I.e., you can just put appium and appium-uiautomator2-driver in your package.json and Appium should be able to find the driver. Then they can both be managed by your existing clean logic without having to worry about cleaning APPIUM_HOME as well.

[tking16]

Thanks @jlipps, does this count for installing too? So would I be able to simply add my required drivers to package.json or would I always need to run appium driver install xcuitest for example? At the moment my drivers aren't being found even though they're in my package.json and I'm running npm install.

[jlipps]

It could be that the version of Appium 2 which supports this functionality has not yet been published as a beta. I'll give it a look.

[jlipps]

OK, I confirmed that beta 25 did not have this feature yet, so I published beta 26 just now. Give it a try. And yes, you should be able to just put appium itself and any drivers as NPM dependencies, run npm install in that dir, and then npx appium should pick up the drivers that are managed by your package.json.

[tking16]

Sorry took a while to get back. Thanks I just tried and it worked!