Show HN: Donobu – Mac App for Web Automation and Testing - CodeGurus

Been working on a desktop app for Mac that lets you create web flows and rerun them (https://www.donobu.com/).

You can optionally use AI (BYOK: bring your own keys) to create flows for you and to do other interesting things, like making vision-based semantic assertions. Also, your data lives on your own filesystem, and we do not see any of it (further still, there is no phoning home at all). A nice benefit of this being a desktop app rather than a SAAS product, is that if you happen to be developing/iterating on a webpage locally, this has no problem hooking into it.

What this intends to be a good fit for:
– Testing web pages, especially locally.
– Exploring random webpages with a stated objective.
– Automating tedious flows. Rerunning a flow won’t get caught up on using a single selector (many websites randomize element IDs, for instance), there is smart failover using a prioritized list of selectors.
– Getting a quick draft of an end-to-end test in Javascript.

What this is a bad fit for:
– Mass web scraping (too slow).
– Adversarial websites.

What we are still working out:
– Click-and-drag operations.
– Websites that are primarily controlled from canvas.
– Smoothing out UI/UX (we are two backend engineers trying our best, and are handedly outgunned by real frontend engineers).

Fun things to try:
– Asking it to assert that a webpage has a certain theme.
– Asking it to run an accessibility report for a page (uses https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core).
– Asking it to run a cookie report for a page.

The tech:
– Java 21 for the main business logic.
– Javalin 6 for the web framework (https://javalin.io/).
– Playwright for controlling the browser (https://playwright.dev/java/).
– Axe for running accessibility reports (https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core).

Related Articles