The State of end-to-end testing with Angular

Mark Thompson (@marktechson)
Angular Blog
Published in
2 min readAug 10, 2022

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beautiful mountain peaks above the clouds during sunset
Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

In the Angular v12 release blog post we announced plans to investigate the future of Protractor.

Based on community feedback via the RFC process, we’ve decided to deprecate Protractor, while working with the community to find a long term support option for active projects that wish to continue using Protractor.

The e2e testing experience

In Angular v12, we added support for three popular e2e testing frameworks, Cypress, Nightwatch, and WebdriverIO. Playwright also has a migration guide.

Currently, new projects running `ng e2e` will walk developers through choosing one of the integrated e2e frameworks.

These tools support custom builders and schematics, which automatically update your project’s configuration to integrate with your Angular applications.

Terminal listing the end-to-end options on the terminal
e2e options from the Angular CLI

What happens to Protractor?

As of v12 Protractor is no longer included as part of new Angular CLI applications. Starting today we’ll only publish critical bug fixes and follow Angular’s deprecation practices. In Angular v16, which is expected in the summer of 2023, we’ll publish the last release of Protractor.

Over the next year updates will be limited to:

  • Security vulnerabilities
  • Browser incompatibilities

What if I still want to use Protractor?

We understand that some teams may not be ready to migrate away from Protractor at this time. We’ve partnered with the independent team at HeroDevs who will be creating a public fork of Protractor, which they will support long term.

Thank you

We’re very proud of the work that went into Protractor and how many developers it served in building robust web apps for their end-users. We would like to take a moment to thank everyone who has contributed to the project over the years.

Sunsetting Protractor gives us the time and bandwidth to focus on high impact projects that will further move Angular into the future. We’re thrilled to be working on new features and improvements to maintain our commitment to enable developers to deliver web apps with confidence.

Until the next time, go build great apps.

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