appium-live-view (Python)

Build a standalone, interactive HTML live view — the Appium Inspector experience (hover to highlight, click to inspect attributes + locators, a selectable source tree, an XPath tester) — from a page source (XML) + screenshot. No server, no browser, no Node: one function returns a self-contained HTML string you can attach to Allure or save anywhere.

It's the Python counterpart of the Appium plugin / JS renderer. The interactive CSS + JS are shared verbatim with the JS renderer (generated by tools/extract-assets.mjs), so both produce the same live view.

Install

pip install ./python          # from this repo
# or, once published:
pip install appium-live-view

Use

from appium_live_view import build_live_view_html
import allure

html = build_live_view_html(
    driver.page_source,                 # XML string
    driver.get_screenshot_as_png(),     # raw PNG bytes (also accepts base64 or a data: URI)
    title="Login screen",
    platform_name=driver.capabilities.get("platformName"),
)
allure.attach(html, "Live view", allure.attachment_type.HTML)

A pytest failure hook is a natural home:

import pytest, allure
from appium_live_view import build_live_view_html

@pytest.hookimpl(hookwrapper=True)
def pytest_runtest_makereport(item, call):
    outcome = yield
    report = outcome.get_result()
    driver = getattr(item.instance, "driver", None)
    if report.when == "call" and report.failed and driver is not None:
        html = build_live_view_html(driver.page_source, driver.get_screenshot_as_png())
        allure.attach(html, "Live view", allure.attachment_type.HTML)

API

build_live_view_html(xml=None, screenshot=None, *, title=None, platform_name=None, selected_path=None, context=None, webview_rect=None, mode=None, parsed=None) -> str

• xml — Appium page source (driver.page_source).
• screenshot — raw PNG bytes, a base64 str, or a full data: URI. Optional (overlays still work without it).
• selected_path — dot-separated node path to pre-select (e.g. the element a step acted on).
• context — "web" / "native" to force locator style + coordinate handling (else auto-detected from the snapshot root).
• webview_rect — {"x", "y", "width", "height"} in CSS px: the WebView's on-screen rectangle, for a full-device screenshot (iOS Safari / a hybrid WebView below a native bar). Overlays are offset by x/y. Not needed for a web-viewport screenshot (Android Chrome).
• mode — "js" to emit a near-empty shell (screenshot + embedded source + runtime) and rebuild the overlays/tree/panels on load instead of pre-rendering them. Much smaller on large pages, but needs JavaScript — the attachment opened standalone, or the Allure report patch inline. Default is the pure-CSS view that also works with no JS.

Also exported: parse_source, parse_coordinates, suggest_locators, absolute_xpath, and WEB_SNAPSHOT_JS.

WebView / hybrid context

In a WebView context driver.page_source is HTML without coordinates. Run the DOM snapshot script in the webview to capture tags + attributes + bounds, then render with context="web" (CSS + DOM-XPath locators):

from appium_live_view import WEB_SNAPSHOT_JS, build_live_view_html

source = driver.execute_script(WEB_SNAPSHOT_JS)          # in the webview context
html = build_live_view_html(source, driver.get_screenshot_as_png(), context="web")

The snapshot records on-device geometry (devicePixelRatio, viewport, screen size), so overlays scale per device and a web-viewport screenshot (Android Chrome) lines up automatically. A full-device screenshot (iOS Safari, or a hybrid WebView below a native bar) has the web content offset from the top; that offset isn't visible to the page, so pass the WebView's on-screen rectangle (CSS px, e.g. from Appium's native context) as webview_rect:

html = build_live_view_html(
    source, driver.get_screenshot_as_png(), context="web",
    webview_rect={"x": 0, "y": 59, "width": 393, "height": 659},
)

Notes

• Interactivity inline in Allure 3: hover and click-to-pin and the source tree are pure CSS and work inline; copy, the XPath tester and the download buttons need JavaScript, which Allure strips from inline attachments. Open the attachment standalone, or apply the report patch in ../examples/allure-inline-interactive/.
• Requires Python 3.8+, no third-party dependencies.