Provide a way to pass settings from runner to fixtures

[fpoppinga]

Feature Request

Provide a way to pass configuration from Runner to test fixtures.

What is the current behavior?

There is no way to pass any information from the TestCafé runner to the actual tests.

What is the expected behavior?

For our use case, we want to provide different configuration from various sources to the tests on a per-execution basis. This means that e.g. configuration files as proposed here are not a viable option.

It would be great, if you could pre-fill the fixture context fixtureCtx from the TestCafé runner, like so:

const tc = await createTestCafe();
const runner = tx.createRunner();

await runner
  .src(myFiles)
  .browsers(myBrowsers)
  .fixtureContext({
    mySetting: getSomeValueSomehow()
  })
  .run();

resulting in this test fixtures:

fixture("My fixture")
  .before(fixtureCtx => {
    // fixtureCtx now equals 
    // {mySetting: ...}
  });

[AndreyBelym]

Hi @fpoppinga, you can use process.env to pass strings from runner to test code.

[fpoppinga]

@AndreyBelym, yes I know, but in my opinion a) process.env is not meant to be used this way, b) this works rather badly for more complex configuration data.

[Asuza]

I too would like to see this feature. I see no other good way to run the same test from two or more different runners with different configuration options. process.env does technically work, but it's hacky and can cause the test to get settings from the wrong runner.

[Artem-Babich]

Hi, you can use userVariables to pass additional data to the tests. You can define them in the configuration file as well as in your runner code:
createTestCafe({userVariables: { url: 'test' }})

import { userVariables } from 'testcafe';

fixture `Test user variables`

test('Type text', async t => {
    await t.expect(userVariables.url).eql('test')
});

Feel free to reopen this issue if this approach cannot be used in your usage scenario.