Six steps for complete test automation with selenium grid

The earlier article “Crucial aspects of browser compatibilty testing with Selenium Grid” gives insight into browser compatibility testing andthe architecture of one of the most popular browser compatibility testing tools, selenium grid. Nowlet‘sget our hands dirty with test automation using Selenium Grid.

Pre-requisites:

The practice exercise in this article requires Eclipse, TestNG, ant, Java, Selenium RC and Selenium Grid. You can execute the code on your favorite platform. For this demo I am using ubuntu as platform.

Installation of Selenium Grid:

Please refer the documentation in seleniumhq for selenium grid download and installation instructions

http://selenium-grid.seleniumhq.org/step_by_step_installation_instructions_for_windows.html
http://selenium-grid.seleniumhq.org/get_started.html

Unzip the Selenium Grid folder and execute the below command in the Selenium Grid root directory to check whether it is installed correctly or not:

ant sanity-check

The output should be BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Now let’s get started.

Step 1. Launch of selenium hub:

Open a terminal and launch the selenium hub using the below command:

ant launch-hub

The hub is where the selenium remote controls providing the different environments like chrome on ubuntu or IE on Windows register themselves. We can view the list of remote controls registered with the hub at http://localhost:4444/console

Now the available remote controls section in the hub console displays nothing  since we did not start any remote control yet.

Step 2. Launch of selenium remote controls:

To start a remote control open a new terminal and issue the below command:

ant launch-remote-control

Then, open the hub console http://localhost:4444/console . The selenium grid hub snapshot displays a remote control on port 5555 for firefox. This is the default environment if we do not specify our own.

We can configure more than one selenium remote control with the same port but more than one remote control cannot run tests on the same port. The reason behind this is simple. For example, more than one person can call the same phone number but cannot talk over the phone to the same person at the same time. Only one call can be answered on a single phone at a time. Similarly it is impossible to run tests in parallel on two selenium remote controls configured with the same port number. We need to configure each remote control with unique port numbers. How do we do this?

If we want to specify our own environment we need to use the Dport and Denvironment options as below:

ant -Dport=5556 -Denvironment=*chrome launch-remote-control

Step 3. Automatic environment setup:

Let’s create a bash script for automatically opening up new terminals and launching several remote controls with the desired environment. If you are working on windows you need to create a batch file instead of a bash script. The below script works only on ubuntu platform.

Navigate to the selenium grid directory and create the below bash script. Let’s call it run.sh

#!/bin/bash
gnome-terminal --title="Hub" -x bash -c "ant launch-hub"
sleep 150
echo "10 seconds wait over"
gnome-terminal --tab --title="Chrome" -x bash -c "ant -Dport=5555 -Denvironment=*chrome launch-remote-control" &
gnome-terminal --tab --title="Firefox" -x bash -c "ant -Dport=5556 -Denvironment=*firefox launch-remote-control" &
gnome-terminal --tab --title="Opera" -x bash -c "ant -Dport=5557 -Denvironment=*opera launch-remote-control"

The bash script opens a new gnome terminal called “Hub” and launches the selenium hub. It sleeps for 150 seconds waiting for the hub to get started. Depending on the time taken you can change the sleep period. The script then opens three other new terminals and registers three remote controls with the respective environments specified. On execution of the script the below output is got on http://localhost:4444/console page.

Now the environment is setup for selenium grid automation. Let’s write a simple selenium grid program.

Step 4. Creating a java project called giftShop:

Suppose you would like to cheer up your friend on her birthday and give her the best birthday party of all time. You are planning  to celebrate your friend’s birthday with balloons, cakes, ice creams and of course a birthday gift!. You are going to surprise your friend with “I have got something for you” from www.gifts.com in such a way that no one can ever put a price tag on the friendship. Let’s write a selenium program to test the display of birthday gifts page on www.gifts.com website on multiple browsers.

1. In Eclipse create a new java project called “giftShop”. Click on Next button and click on the “Libraries” tab. Click on “Add External JARs” button. Select the testng and selenium server JAR files as below and click on finish button.

2. Now create a new TestNG class inside the giftShop project. In the source folder field, browse to /giftShop/src. Give the package name as giftShop and class name as giftBox. Click on finish button.

Step 5. Enable testing in parallel mode in multiple browsers:

Right click on the giftShop project. Click on “Convert into TestNG” option. “Generate testng.xml” window will get displayed. This option will be available only if the TestNG plugin for eclipse is installed. Select “tests” in parallel mode dropdown and click on Finish button.

To organize the project structure create a folder called config and place the generated testng.xml file in it.

In the testng.xml file we just created, specify the browser and port names with which we have configured our selenium remote control as in the below piece of code.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE suite SYSTEM "http://testng.org/testng-1.0.dtd">
<suite name="Suite" parallel="tests">
	<test name="Chrome">
		<parameter name="selenium.host" value="localhost"/>
		<parameter name="selenium.port" value="5555"/>
		<parameter name="selenium.browser" value="*chrome"/>
		<parameter name="selenium.url" value="http://www.gifts.com/"/>
		<parameter name="bdayLink" value="//li[@id='nav-oc']/div/ul[3]/li[3]/a/b"/>
		<classes>
			<class name="giftShop.giftBox" />
		</classes>
	</test>
	<test name="Firefox">
		<parameter name="selenium.host" value="localhost"/>
		<parameter name="selenium.port" value="5556"/>
		<parameter name="selenium.browser" value="*firefox"/>
		<parameter name="selenium.url" value="http://www.gifts.com/"/>
		<parameter name="bdayLink" value="//li[@id='nav-oc']/div/ul[3]/li[3]/a/b"/>
		<classes>
			<class name="giftShop.giftBox" />
		</classes>
	</test>
	<test name="Opera">
		<parameter name="selenium.host" value="localhost"/>
		<parameter name="selenium.port" value="5557"/>
		<parameter name="selenium.browser" value="*opera"/>
		<parameter name="selenium.url" value="http://www.gifts.com/"/>
		<parameter name="bdayLink" value="//li[@id='nav-oc']/div/ul[3]/li[3]/a/b"/>
		<classes>
			<class name="giftShop.giftBox" />
		</classes>
	</test>
</suite>

Step 6: Writing selenium grid program:

This selenium grid program will start selenium on chrome, firefox and opera. It would open up the www.gifts.com website and click on birthday as occasion. It asserts whether the landing page displays the birthday gifts in all the three browsers as expected.

package giftShop;
 
import org.testng.annotations.Test;
import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.AfterClass;
import org.testng.annotations.BeforeClass;
import org.testng.annotations.Parameters;
import com.thoughtworks.selenium.DefaultSelenium;
import com.thoughtworks.selenium.Selenium;
 
public class giftBox 
{
	Selenium selenium;
 
	//Declaration of variables used in this program
	String strTimeout="30000";
	String bdayTitle="Birthday Gifts - Birthday Gift Ideas from Gifts.com";
	int intsleepTime=15000;
 
    @BeforeClass
    //Reads the values of host, port, browser and url "www.gifts.com" from testng.xml
    @Parameters({ "selenium.host", "selenium.port", "selenium.browser", "selenium.url" })
    public void beforeClass(String host, String port, String browser, String url)
    {
        selenium = new DefaultSelenium(host, Integer.parseInt(port),browser, url);
        selenium.start();
        selenium.open("");
        selenium.windowMaximize();
        selenium.windowFocus();
        selenium.deleteAllVisibleCookies();
    } 
 
    @Test
    @Parameters({ "bdayLink" })
    public void testB(String bDayGift)
    {
        try
        {
        	//Click on birthday as occasion on www.gifts.com website
        	selenium.click(bDayGift);
        	selenium.waitForPageToLoad(strTimeout);
 
        	//Verify that the birthday gift items page is displayed
        	Assert.assertEquals(bdayTitle, selenium.getTitle());
            Thread.sleep(intsleepTime);
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    } 
 
    @AfterClass
    public void afterClass() 
    {
        selenium.close();
        selenium.stop();
    } 
}

Running the test case:

Please do the following to run the selenium grid test case (after the hub and RCs are launched):
1. Right click on the testng.xml file
2. Click on Run as “TestNG Suite”

Please feel free to post any comments or ask questions.