[Future roadmap] Combining dashboard and device farm into a single plugin

[sudharsan-selvaraj]

I am excited to share with the team a new proposal to integrate our two existing plugins, Appium Dashboard, and Appium Device Farm, into a single plugin. As we all know, there are some overlaps between the two, and I believe that integrating them will not only eliminate any redundancy but also enhance our overall efficiency of the user experience.

By merging the two projects, we will have a more comprehensive testing solution that covers both the device management and reporting aspects of the automation process. Our customers will be able to access all the necessary data from one unified platform, which will provide them with a seamless user experience.

This integration will also help us streamline our development efforts and reduce costs by eliminating the need for two separate teams. With a unified team working on the project, we can expect faster development cycles, fewer errors, and more innovative features.

We understand that there may be some challenges in integrating the two projects, but we are confident that we can overcome them with our collective skills and expertise. We are excited about this new opportunity and believe that it will benefit not only our customers but also the maintainers.

I would like to get the team's opinion and if everything goes well, I would like to take a lead and propose the list of action items to make the integration work better.

[saikrishna321]

Hi @sudharsan-selvaraj Thanks for bring this up. Clearly we see a lot of users are using both the plugins.

Happy to collaborate

[sudharsan-selvaraj]

@saikrishna321 , My initial plan was to do a refactor of device farm similar to Selenium grid's architecture. But after doing a deep dive into selenium grid code base i figured out that the refactor would not greatly fit into the appium plugin ecosystem. So below is the finalised plan for the integration.

1. We need to have a defined set of endpoints for Grid/Node communication. I will list down the high level endpoints below.

Sample endpoints in grid

1. POST /grid/node/- for a new node to register
2. DELETE /grid/node/:nodeId- to remove a node
3. POST /grid/node/:nodeId/device - for registering the devices

Sample endpoints in node

1. GET /node/:sessionId/video - for a getting the video of the session
2. GET /node/:sessionId/logs/:logType - for a getting the logs for the session (logType may be adb/ios/appium)

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2. Currently in appium dashboard, we make use of sqlite database to store the session details. But we encountered lot of issues while installing sqlite npm dependency. because of which the installation of plugin itself will fail. So i was planning to add a postinstall script which tries to install the sqlite dependency. If the installation fails, we will show a message to the user and it will be then user's task to figure out and install the dependency manually.

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3. For creating the dashboard, we will have to register a global express level middleware that listens for all incoming requests and stores the logs to database. This middleware will only be registered to Grid instance.

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4. UI modification, Once the backend part is done, we will update the UI to show the logs and other associated details for the session.

I will start working on #1, #2 and #3. Once the backend implementation is done, we can start working on the UI changes.

Feel free to add your thoughts.

[saikrishna321]

@sudharsan-selvaraj Any updates on this?

[sudharsan-selvaraj]

Initial backend related changes are made as part of #940 and the feature will be disabled for all end users. Once the FE changes are completed we shall do a end-to-end and enable it for other users.