Crafting robust plugins: introducing grafana/plugin-e2e

Plugin developers and users typically want their plugins to be compatible with a range of Grafana versions. However, ensuring this is true can be a challenge. The environment, APIs, and UI components may differ from one version to another. Manual testing is tedious and error-prone. End-to-End testing across multiple versions is prohibitively complicated given the version-to-version changes in Grafana itself - until now.

We would like to introduce @grafana/plugin-e2e - a new end-to-end testing library that is designed specifically for Grafana plugin developers. It extends @playwright/test capabilities with relevant fixtures, models, and expect matchers; enabling comprehensive end-to-end testing of Grafana plugins across multiple versions of Grafana. This package simplifies the testing process, ensuring your plugin is robust and compatible with various Grafana environments.

The first major version of @grafana/plugin-e2e has just been released. This is the library we will offer from now on as part of our tooling, the grafana/e2e package is now deprecated.

For everyone who is using the latest version of our create-plugin tool: All new plugins you scaffold already have this library integrated and set up - all you need to do is start writing tests.

And for those who already have plugins they are maintaining: You can keep using cypress as you did before and bit by bit, in parallel, migrate to using this library instead.