Tag Archives: selenium

Getting started with Selenium the easier way

development, ,

This aim of the project that is available on my Github, is to simplify the initial phase of the development of the automated end-to-end tests created using Selenium WebDriver.

Before you can start using Selenium, you have to get the driver for your browser and

  • set the path to that binary System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "path")
  • know the property name, here webdriver.gecko.driver.
  • Example of manual setup can be found here.

The good

  • Everything is straightforward, and you know where everything is.

The bad

  • It is annoying.
  • You are hardcoding path to the location of the driver in the source code;
    • Imagine you are on Windows and you share the code with somebody who is using Linux or macOS.
    • Or the system running the code is using a completely different folder structure (for example in the CI pipeline).
  • You must check whether a new driver was released.
  • You must download a different version of the driver when you upgrade your browser, and the driver is no longer compatible with your browser.
  • You will not be able to run tests in various browsers without refactoring.

This project is hiding this away by employing the power of WebDriverManager project. The WDM project automatically detects the type and version of the browser you have installed on your system and download the appropriate driver automatically. See WDM project examples for more details.

All the necessary setup is reduced to

WebDriverManager.firefoxdriver().setup();

FirefoxOptions options = new FirefoxOptions();
options.merge(capabilities);
options.setHeadless(HEADLESS);

return new FirefoxDriver(options);

Execution

Tests can be run inside the IDE or from the command line using mvn clean test.

Configuration

The project is using the WDM project and the code I discovered recently with a little bit of configuration. Then the tests can be executed in different browsers.

The execution can be configured with system properties.

mvn test -Dbrowser=firefox -Dheadless=true

Or with a property file .properties located in the current context directory – for maven test execution the directory is /mastering-selenium-testng/target/test-classes. See execution log for details.

When system properties are used, they override the values from the properties file.

When property value is not provided the default value is used:

browser=chrome
headless=true
remote=false
seleniumGridURL=
platform=
browserVersion=

The configuration can change

  • browser type (chrome|firefox|edge|ie|safari|opera)
  • headless mode (true|false)
  • remote execution

Or create run configuration for JUnit and set the “VM options”:
Run configuration

Libraries used

Notes

Execution with Opera browser was not tested.

When running tests in Safari, you may get the following error

[ERROR] com.masteringselenium.tests.TodoMvcTests  Time elapsed: 0.994 s  <<< ERROR!
org.openqa.selenium.SessionNotCreatedException:
Could not create a session: You must enable the 'Allow Remote Automation' option in Safari's Develop menu to control Safari via WebDriver.
Build info: version: '3.141.59', revision: 'e82be7d358', time: '2018-11-14T08:17:03'
System info: host: '...', ip: '...', os.name: 'Mac OS X', os.arch: 'x86_64', os.version: '10.14.6', java.version: '10.0.1'
Driver info: driver.version: SafariDriver

The solution as mentioned in the error is to enable Allow Remote Automation option in Safari’s Develop menu, for more details see Testing with WebDriver in Safari page.

Grab the code at https://github.com/kfrajtak/selenium-starter-kit and spend more time on testing than on setting the infrastructure.