A painless guide to install Appium and Appium Inspector on Linux

Prerequisites

• A Linux operating system installed box
• Node.js and npm (Node Package Manager)

Install npm

Follow the official instructions here.

# installs nvm (Node Version Manager)
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.7/install.sh | bash

# download and install Node.js (you may need to restart the terminal)
nvm install 20

# verifies the right Node.js version is in the environment
node -v # should print `v20.15.1`

# verifies the right NPM version is in the environment
npm -v # should print `10.7.0`

Install Appium

Open a terminal window and run the following command to install Appium globally using npm

$ npm install --location=global appium

Run the following command to test if appium is working

$ appium --help
usage: appium [-h] [-v]
              {setup,server,driver,plugin} ...

A webdriver-compatible server that facilitates
automation of web, mobile, and other types of apps
across various platforms.

positional arguments:
  {setup,server,driver,plugin}
    setup               Select a preset of
                        official drivers/plugins
                        to install compatible with
                        'Linux' host platform.
                        Existing drivers/plugins
                        will remain. The default
                        preset is 'mobile'.
    server              Run an Appium server
    driver              Access the driver
                        management CLI commands
    plugin              Access the plugin
                        management CLI commands

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and
                        exit
  -v, --version         show program's version
                        number and exit

Reference

Install UiAutomator2 Driver

Run the following command

$ appium driver install uiautomator2

Check if uiautomator is installed

$ appium driver list
✔ Listing available drivers
- uiautomator2@3.7.2 [installed (npm)]
- xcuitest [not installed]
- espresso [not installed]
- mac2 [not installed]
- windows [not installed]
- safari [not installed]
- gecko [not installed]
- chromium [not installed]

Reference

Install Appium Inspector

Appium Inspector is a graphical tool for inspecting mobile applications, interacting with UI elements, generating UI object paths and codes during automation.

Download AppImage:

• Visit the Appium Inspector releases page on GitHub: https://github.com/appium/appium-inspector/releases
• Download the .AppImage file compatible with your Linux system (32-bit or 64-bit).

Make AppImage Executable:

Open a terminal window in the downloaded AppImage file

$ chmod a+x Appium-Inspector-linux-<version>.AppImage

Run AppImage

$ ./Appium-Inspector-linux-<version>.AppImage

Reference

Download SDK Platform Tools for Linux

Download SDK Platform Tools

Untar the download and keep it in your preferable path. Set up the environment variable ANDROID_SDK_ROOT to point to the extraction directory. add the following line to .bashrc

$ export ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=/path/to/platform-tools

Run Appium and Appimage in two seperate sessions

Save Capability

Add and save the following capability to the Appium-Inspector for inspecting an Android app UI interactions like a web browser inspection

{
  "platformName": "Android",
  "appium:automationName": "uiautomator2"
}

Finally open an emulator, connect it with the PC with adb and start a session to interact with the app to automate.