Guide to install & uninstall appium drivers uiautomator2, xcuitest etc

Starting from appium 2.x, appium decoupled appium drivers from it’s base installation.

Now users need to install appium drivers individually as per the need basis.

Install appium 2 –

To install the appium 2 globally on your machine –

npm install -g appium

If you are using mac, then you can run using sudo command –

sudo npm install -g appium

Enter your mac system password once prompted.

On windows, open the command prompt in admin mode and run the command –

npm install -g appium

To uninstall appium –

npm uninstall -g appium

List all available appium drivers –

To list down all the available appium drivers – (whether installed or not)

appium driver list

Individual appium driver installation –

Appium decoupled all the drivers and have to install them individually on a need basis.

Example –

Run below command for IOS driver i.e – xcuitest

appium driver install xcuitest

For android i.e – uiautomator2

appium driver install uiautomator2

Verify the installations –

You can install appium-doctor npm package to verify the installations

npm install -g appium-doctor

appium-doctor --version

Then individually for all appium drivers, we can verify the setup is correct to run tests on Android or IOS devices.

appium-doctor —-android

appium-doctor —-ios

Updating the appium drivers –

To list down all the appium drivers installed on machine –

appium driver list

To verify if any updates available

appium driver list --updates

To update individual appium drivers or multiple drivers at a time –

appium driver update xcuitest

or

appium driver update xcuitest, uiautomator2 …

Note – All the drivers are installed under home/.appium

Uninstalling individual drivers

appium driver uninstall [driverName] || true

|| true will uninstall if it’s installed.

example –

appium driver uninstall xcuitest || true

as per https://github.com/appium/appium/discussions/16598

Issue –

sometimes you might get an error while installing individual drivers as mentioned below –

appium driver install uiautomator2

———————————————————————————-

info Appium Setting NODE_PATH to ‘/usr/local/lib/node_modules’

✖ Installing ‘uiautomator2’ using NPM install spec ‘appium-uiautomator2-driver’

Error: ✖ Encountered an error when installing package: npm command ‘install –save-dev appium-uiautomator2-driver –json’ failed with code 1.

STDOUT:

STDERR:

npm ERR! code ERESOLVE

npm ERR! ERESOLVE unable to resolve dependency tree

npm ERR! 

npm ERR! While resolving: undefined@undefined

npm ERR! Found: appium@1.22.3

npm ERR! node_modules/appium

npm ERR!   appium@”^1.22.1″ from the root project

npm ERR! 

npm ERR! Could not resolve dependency:

npm ERR! peer appium@”^2.0.0-beta.40″ from appium-uiautomator2-driver@2.7.0

npm ERR! node_modules/appium-uiautomator2-driver

npm ERR!   dev appium-uiautomator2-driver@”*” from the root project

npm ERR! 

npm ERR! Fix the upstream dependency conflict, or retry

npm ERR! this command with –force, or –legacy-peer-deps

npm ERR! to accept an incorrect (and potentially broken) dependency resolution.

npm ERR! 

npm ERR! See /Users/skpatro/.npm/eresolve-report.txt for a full report.

{

  “error”: {

    “code”: “ERESOLVE”,

    “summary”: “unable to resolve dependency tree”,

    “detail”: “\nWhile resolving: undefined@undefined\nFound: appium@1.22.3\nnode_modules/appium\n  appium@\”^1.22.1\” from the root project\n\nCould not resolve dependency:\npeer appium@\”^2.0.0-beta.40\” from appium-uiautomator2-driver@2.7.0\nnode_modules/appium-uiautomator2-driver\n  dev appium-uiautomator2-driver@\”*\” from the root project\n\nFix the upstream dependency conflict, or retry\nthis command with –force, or –legacy-peer-deps\nto accept an incorrect (and potentially broken) dependency resolution.\n\nSee /Users/skpatro/.npm/eresolve-report.txt for a full report.”

  }

}

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:

npm ERR!     /Users/userName/.npm/_logs/2022-09-21T07_02_04_446Z-debug-0.log

———————————————————————————-

Solution –

Navigate to users/userName directory and delete the following folder and files

• /node_modules/
• package.json
• package.lock.json

These above files refer to earlier appium installation.

then try to run command to install appium drivers, you should be good now!