Patience

Full stack integration testing for Matrix clients and servers

Features

• Any permutation of supported clients can be tested together
• Client specifics are hidden by default (but still accessible) so tests can target many clients without modification
• Tests written in TypeScript
• Report mode gives a quick summary of results in your terminal
• Interactive mode allows you to try out and debug the clients in your browser
• Builds on top of Complement's homerunner API
• Test harness displays all clients together on one page

Supported environments

Patience aims to support testing different combinations of Matrix clients and servers in a unified environment.

Element Web and Hydrogen are the currently supported clients. Anything that fits in an iframe should be easy to add. Tools such as Appetize could be used to add mobile clients.

Synapse and Dendrite are the currently supported homeservers.

Usage

Setup is currently a bit manual, as this project is just getting started. If you have suggestions on how to improve setup, please file an issue.

To get started with Patience in your project, first collect the following bits and bobs:

• Docker
• Go
• Node.js
• homerunner from Complement
  • go install github.com/matrix-org/complement/cmd/homerunner@latest
• One or more Complement-ready homeserver images
• Chrome
  • We plan to switch to Playwright in the future to support additional browsers

Create a directory to hold your tests and add Patience:

npm add @matrix-org/patience --save-dev

Add a test, perhaps by copying hello.ts. At a minimum, you should call orchestrate to set up servers, clients, and rooms for your test. Most likely you'll want to actually test something too.

To run your tests in reporting mode:

npx patience '*.ts'

You should see:

Finished running tests, all tests passed! 🎉

To run your tests in interactive mode:

npx patience '*.ts' -- --manual

This will start a server at localhost:8000 which you can navigate to in your browser. Click on one of listed test files to watch the test run. You can interact with the clients, timeline, etc. The clients remain after for exploration until you stop the server.