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The Appium Config File

Instead of passing arguments on the command line to Appium, you may add them to a special config file. Appium will read values from this config file when it runs. (Please note that CLI arguments have precedence over configuration files; if a value is set in a config file and via CLI argument, the CLI argument is preferred.)

Supported Config File Formats

You can store your config data in the following kinds of files:

  • JSON
  • YAML
  • JS (a JavaScript file exporting a JS object)
  • CJS (the same as above; the extension is for common JS)

Warning

Note: Configuration files in ESM format are not currently supported.

Supported Config File Locations

Configuration files can be named anything, but the following filenames will be automatically discovered and loaded by Appium:

  • .appiumrc.json (recommended)
  • .appiumrc.yaml
  • .appiumrc.yml
  • .appiumrc.js
  • .appiumrc.cjs
  • appium.config.js
  • appium.config.cjs
  • .appiumrc (which is considered to be JSON)

Further, if your project uses Node.js, you can use store the configuration inside an appium property in your package.json and it will be automatically discovered.

Appium will search up the directory tree from the current working directory for one of these files. If it reaches the current user's home directory or filesystem root, it will stop looking.

To specify a custom location for your config file, use appium --config /path/to/config/file.

Configuration File Format

First, you might want to look at some examples:

A description of the format is available, as well:

To describe in words, the config file will have a root server property, and all arguments are child properties. For certain properties which must be supplied on the command-line as comma-delimited lists, JSON strings, and/or external filepaths, these instead will be of their "native" type. For example, --use-plugins <value> needs <value> to be comma-delimited string or path to a delimited file. However, the config file just wants an array, e.g.,:

{
  "server": {
    "use-plugins": ["my-plugin", "some-other-plugin"]
  }
}

Configuring extensions (drivers and plugins)

For driver-and-plugin-specific configuration, these live under the server.driver and server.plugin properties, respectively. Each driver or plugin will have its own named property, and the values of any specific configuration it provides are under this. For example:

{
  "server": {
    "driver": {
      "xcuitest": {
        "webkit-debug-proxy-port": 5400
      }
    }
  }
}

Note

The above configuration corresponds to the --driver-xcuitest-webkit-debug-proxy-port CLI argument.

All properties are case-sensitive and will be in kebab-case. For example, callback-port is allowed, but callbackPort is not.