Applications and environments

Applications and environments are an essential part of testing in mabl, creating a framework for your team's testing strategy.

Configuring applications and environments is a prerequisite step for accomplishing the following:

• Associating tests to a specific application URL
• Organizing tests into plans
• Running tests on a schedule
• Pulling variables from environments
• Integrating tests into your CI/CD pipeline
• Testing applications that can't be accessed from the public Internet
• Reviewing aggregate test status and coverage metrics to assess application quality

The following diagram illustrates how applications and environments organize your tests at a high level.

This guide explains applications and environments as they are defined in mabl and describes how to configure the applications and environments for your mabl tests.

Applications

Applications in mabl represent the list of applications you are testing. For example, a workspace for Plants-To-Go, a hypothetical ecommerce business that sells indoor plants, might have these three applications on the configuration page:

• Plants-To-Go web application
• Plants-To-Go marketing site
• Plants-To-Go job portal

Default mabl plans

When you create a new application, mabl adds two default plans and tests to the workspace.

1. The "Verify home page load and login" plan contains one test: "Visit home page." This test is a basic smoke test that visits the application URL. The "Visit home page" test runs every 4 hours and on deployment.
2. The "Check all pages for broken links and errors" plan also contains one test: "Visit all linked pages within the app." This test is also known as the link crawler test. The link crawler test runs once a week.

Environments

Environments in mabl should align with stages of your software development lifecycle where you deploy your code to, such as Dev, QA, Alpha, Beta, Release Candidate, and Production.

You can configure application URLs for one or more environments. In the following example, the application Acme App is configured to run in the Production, QA, and Staging environments.

Environment settings

The following settings are controlled at the environment level:

• Environment variables - store variables at the environment level and use them across multiple tests
• Link agent - set up a secure tunnel to test applications in internal environments that cannot be accessed from the public Internet
• Page interaction speed - modify the speed of interaction in browser test runs.

Configuring applications and environments

You can manage applications and environments on the Applications page: Configuration > Applications.

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Owners and editors only

Only users with an editor or owner role can modify environments and applications.

Creating your first application and environment

If there are no applications and environments configured for your workspace, go to Configuration > Applications and click on the + New button to create your first application and environment.

On the New Application page, define the following values:

• Application name
• Application description - optional
• Application URL
• Environment name
• If the application URL requires authentication with username and password to access the page, check the option "Automatically log in when encountering a login page."
  • Enter a username and password for logging into this application. When you create the application, this username and password become mabl credentials.

Click Save to create your first application and environment.

Creating an application

Go to Configuration > Applications. Click on the + New application button to load the New Application page.

On the New Application page, define the following values:

• Application name
• Application description - optional
• Application URL
• Environment - choose an environment from the dropdown.
• If the application URL requires authentication with username and password to access the page, check the option "Automatically log in when encountering a login page."
  • Enter a username and password for logging into this application. When you create the application, this username and password become mabl credentials.

Click Save to create the application.

Editing an application

To edit an application's name, go to Configurations > Applications. Click on the application's name to open the Edit Application page.

To edit an application's URL, follow the steps for creating and editing application URLs.

Creating an environment

Go to Configuration > Applications. Click on the + New environment button to load the New Environment page.

On the New Environment page, give the environment a name. You may also define the following optional settings:

• Environment description
• Environment variables
• Link agent
• Page interaction speed

Click Save to create the environment.

Editing an environment

To edit an environment's name or settings, go to Configuration > Applications and take the following steps:

1. Hover your mouse over the environment name. A pencil icon will appear next to the environment name.
2. Click on the pencil icon to open the Edit Environment page.

You can update settings on the Edit Environment page.