Using Ember Inspector with Testem

Ember has a great testing story now, and Ember CLI hooks up everything you need to make starting to write tests really straightforward.

Yet, since making the switch to test driven development something I’ve really missed is the excellent Ember Inspector in the browser.

Because the test runner Testem launches Chrome with a temporary profile it means that there are no extensions installed, therefore no Ember Inspector.

My web search didn’t find an immediate solution to this problem, Stack Overflow’s best response suggested a hack.

After a bit of digging I learned Chrome extensions can be installed globally for all users.

The process involves creating a JSON file with the id of the extension in a specific directory.

For Ember Inspector this translates to:

Which needs to be located at:

/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/External Extensions

If you don’t have those directories already you’ll need to create them.

After that you can use:

return pauseTest();

In your acceptance tests to help give you time to take a look under the hood in Ember Inspector.