selenium

Overview

This is the selenium module. It sets up a selenium grid infrastructure with appium nodes

Module Description

Selenium automates browsers.

The web is a very complicated place to develop in. It is very easy to end up with an application which doesn't quite function as expected in one of your target browsers. Modern life has exacerbated the issue as the chances are your target browsers will cover varying mobiles and tablets.

We use this module to setup and manage a cross platform selenium grid which contains various physical android devices, a Mac Mini (used for Safari and the iOS simulator) and a few Ubuntu servers (for chrome and firefox)

What does this module actually do?

This selenium module will obtain deploy the selenium standalone server and set it up to run as a service under the selenium user. The instance of selenium can run in either hub or node configurations.

The module also enables instances of Appium to be deployed and configured as selenium grid nodes.

It will not obtain the android sdk or java. Both of which are required for the server to run.

Things to note

Selenium tends to require some display to render the browsers it is testing on. On Linux you can use Xvfb to create a virtual display to test on. However on Mac and Windows, you will find that the user you use to manage selenium must be logged in (to have access to the desktop).

Therefore selenium on Windows and Mac will only start up when the selenium user logs in.

Reverse Tethering

The selenium module is capable of setting up reverse tethering for your android device. In order for this to work your device must be rooted. If you do not require reverse you can disable it by default by setting $reverse_tether to false on the selenium class.

Reverse tethering is configured to automatically set up when a device is connected to the host pc.

Below shows an animation of real devices which are reverse tethered being used for testing via appium.

Setup

What selenium affects

• Creates a service which is named selenium by default
• Manages a selenium user and group. Used for running the server
• Takes ownership of USB Devices (for the selenium user)
• Configures reverse tethering of the devices
• Runs on port 4444 by default

Usage

Create a selenium grid hub (tested on Ubuntu 14.04)

include selenium
selenium::server { 'hub': 
  role => 'hub'
}

Create a selenium testing node. This configuration will require xvfb to be setup and managed outside of this module

include selenium
selenium::server { 'node':
  role     => 'node'
  headless => true
  hub_host => 'server.name.of.hub'
}

Create a selenium server node on a mac mini

# Create a node to test safari on
include selenium
selenium::server { 'node':
  role        => 'node'
  hub_host    => 'server.name.of.hub',
  capabilites => [{browserName => 'safari', maxInstances => 5}]
}

# Set up appium to test against with the iOS simulator
include selenium::appium # Manage and install appium
selenium::appium::server { 'appium-for-ios-sim':
   port => 4723
}

Create a selenium server node on windows

class { 'selenium': 
  manage_user       => false,
  manage_group      => false,
  user              => 'Selenium',
  group             => 'Users',
  standalone_server => "d:/apps/selenium-server-standalone-2.45.0.jar",
  chromedriver      => 'd:/apps/chromedriver.exe',
  iedriver          => 'd:/apps/IEDriver.exe',
}

selenium::server { 'node' :
  role     => 'node',
  hub_host => server.name.of.hub',,
}

Manage an android device such that it reverse tethers on connection (Ubuntu only)

include selenium::udev
selenium::device { 'GoogleNexus5' :
  vendor        => '18d1',
  serial_number => 'S31alNumB3r',
}

Limitations

This module has been tested on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Windows Server 2008 and Mac OS X Yosemite

Reverse tethering has been tested on:

• HTC Desire X
• Google Nexus 5
• Google Nexus 7

Contributors

Christopher Johnson - [email protected]