What's this about:

A(n) easy way to tell you how to properly get to run selenium tests on your current devenv.

Are you intrested about	You can read about it here
What is Selenium	http://www.seleniumhq.org/docs/01_introducing_selenium.jsp
Selenium Python binding	https://selenium-python.readthedocs.org/

Important note: At the writing of this page the commonly used DevEnv is an Ubuntu 14.04 so, the easy links are for those ones. Also the current Selenium version is 2.45.0 which requires a Firefox 35.0 to run properly.

Programs	Links to check out
Newest Selenium versions	http://www.seleniumhq.org/download/
Firefox builds for Ubuntu (.deb)	https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-security/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

Let's get started

First we need to install Firefox on our DevEnv.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox

Important note: Here comes the tricky part usually Selenium is behind the latest realeses and doesn't work well with the new ones. To get this problem out of the way we need to downgrade our install.

wget https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-security/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+build/6457763/+files/firefox_33.0%2Bbuild2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i firefox_33.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1_amd64.deb 

Also because of unattended-upgrades this will be replaced with the newest stable version. Let's put firefox to the unattended-upgrades blacklist. To do that open the

/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

file and edit the

Unattended-Upgrade::Package-Blacklist

list to include "firefox" like this:

Unattended-Upgrade::Package-Blacklist {
        "firefox";
}

Finally save the modifications.

Next we need to install a (virtual) X display server. The current fabfile uses the Xvfb so I personally recommend that one.

More about Xfvb: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xvfb

sudo apt-get install Xvfb

Check the Python packages

Do not forget to check if the required test packages are installed

pip install -r requirements/test.txt

It's done

That's it. Now you can run the selenium test just as you would run the normal tests.

Namely:

fab selenium

or

xvfb-run --server-args="-screen 0, 1920x1080x24" ./manage.py test --settings=circle.settings.selenium_test

You can run one test alone, but in selenium it's not recommended. Usually each test requires previous tests successfull run to work (test) on with.

fab selenium:dashboard.tests.selenium.basic_tests:BasicSeleniumTests.test_01_login

View test logs and controll pictures

To view the log simply tail or open the following files:

tail -f -n 100 'dashboard/tests/selenium/selenium.log'

For convinience Selenium tests takes pictures in some cases of exceptions, to help see the problem visually. These are

find dashboard/tests/selenium -type f -name "*.png"

Namely

Exception	Picture name
Cannot list the select possibilities	ss_from_list_options.png
Cannot select the chosen one	ss_from_select_option.png
Cannot find the requested href	ss_from_get_link_by_href.png
Cannot inject javascript to the page	ss_from_click_on_link.png
Cannot find the form controls	ss_from_login.png
Cannot accept the operation confirmation	ss_from_wait_and_accept_operation.png
Cannot save a vm as a template	ss_from_save_template_from_vm.png
Cannot create a base template virtual machine	ss_from_create_base_template.png
Cannot find the template's id	ss_from_get_template_id.png
Cannot check the result of an operation	ss_from_check_operation_result.png
Cannot filter timeline activities to find most recent	ss_from_recently.png
Selenium could not locate the timeline	ss_from_get_timeline_elements.png
Cannot get timeline elements	ss_from_get_timeline_elements.png
Selenium did not found any activity	ss_from_get_timeline_elements.png
Cannot find the searched activity	ss_from_get_timeline_elements.png
Cannot start a template from a base one	ss_from_create_template_from_base.png
Cannot delete the desired template	ss_from_delete_template.png
Cannot start a VM	ss_from_create_random_vm.png
Cannot destroy a VM	ss_from_delete_vm.png