Heyo all 👋

I’ve been experimenting with running sharded e2e tests on the same machine by booting multiple iOS simulators, but I couldn’t find an official way to do it. The sharding docs seem to focus on multi-machine setups.

I did manage to make it work, but it feels very hacky, and I’d love to know if there’s a better/official approach.

What I did:

• Created an intermediate script that launches WDIO via WdioLauncher.
• Passed the device UDID via process.env.UDID = 'xxx' before calling .run().
• Triggered wdio runs n times depending on the desired number of shards
• Added a 2-second delay between launching shards so they don’t grab the same UDID via env variables.
• Set a unique appium:wdaLocalPort and Appium port per shard to avoid conflicts.
• Programmatically created devices based on shard count (probably out of WDIO’s scope).

Is single-machine sharding with iOS simulators officially supported?

Thanks! 🙏