Alvin Lai

Get Selenium on Rails to Use A Separate Firefox Browser Profile

Posted by Alvin Lai on November 05, 2009

You might notice that Selenium’s rake acceptance test would fail the second time because Firefox restored tabs that belonged to the first time you ran the acceptance test.

If you run Selenium for the first time round, you’ll end with 2 tabs, the second one being the results:

When you run the test again, the first tab (circled in red) which was created in the previous session (also the first Selenium test), restored by Firefox, also runs a parallael Selenium test, resulting test failures:

The way to fix this is to disable session restore in Firefox’s about:config:

But what if you love Firefox’s session restore feature? Create a separate Firefox profile for Selenium testing!

Go to Terminal.app then enter this to run Firefox’s Profile Manager:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -ProfileManager

Then modify /vendor/plugins/selenium-on-rails/lib/selenium-on-rails/acceptance_test_runner.rb:

Under the start_browser method, add a

-P Selenium

An example:

command = "\"#{path}\" -P Selenium \"http://#{HOST}:#{@port}#{TEST_RUNNER_URL}?test=tests&auto=true&baseUrl=#{base_url}&resultsUrl=postResults/#{log}&multiWindow=#{MULTI_WINDOW}\""

That would set Selenium to use Firefox with your newly created Selenium Profile, where you can turn off Session Restore just for that profile and still enjoy it in your default Firefox profile.

Posted in Ruby on Rails, Test Development
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Run Rake Tasks Locally in Capistano with Quit on Failure

Posted by Alvin Lai on November 04, 2009

After a git commit and push, the next command you might run is cap deploy. But how about running your tests?

If you don’t want to run any extra commands beyond git commit/push and cap deploy, you’ll want to look having your Capistrano script run your Rake tests locally too.

The Capistrano command “run” execute stuff remotely on your target deployed server, but since the deploy.rb Capistrano script is just a regular ruby script, you can just use “system()” or ““” (backticks) to execute commands locally.

Here’s an example:

# acceptance test task :run_acceptance_test do system("rake test:acceptance") # can use backticks `` as a shorthand also exit if $? != 0 end before "deploy:set_comment", :run_acceptance_test

Let me explain.

before "deploy:set_comment", :run_acceptance_test

would tell Capistrano to run your custom named task, in the case here, it’s “:run_acceptance_test”.

exit if $? != 0

Would check the error code of the previously run system command and if the error code (defined by $?) is not 0 (zero), it’ll cause the whole Capistrano script to exit.

So, if rake test:acceptance fails, the Capistrano script will exit and deployment will not happen at all.

Posted in Ruby on Rails, Test Development
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Installing RSelenese in Selenium IDE

Posted by Alvin Lai on October 30, 2009

Selenium on Rails is just plain awesome, providing an web testing interface that doesn’t interfere with your main code. That said, there’s a Firefox plugin called Selenium IDE that records your actions in Firefox and generates tests for use with Selenium, how cool is that!

The only problem is, Selenium IDE doesn’t output in RSelenese and having to port one of their supported formats (Ruby Selenium) is a pain. So what do you do? Install the RSelenese plugin of course!

Here are the steps:

Then paste the following code:

/* * Selenium on Rails RSelenese format for Selenium IDE * * Written by Shinya Kasatani (kasatani at gmail.com) */


load('formatCommandOnlyAdapter.js');
function string(value) {

	if (value != null) {

		value = value.replace(/\\/g, '\\\\');

		value = value.replace(/\"/g, '\\"');

		value = value.replace(/\r/g, '\\r');

		value = value.replace(/\n/g, '\\n');

		return '"' + value + '"';

	} else {

		return '""';

	}

}
function underscore(text) {

	return text.replace(/[A-Z]/g, function(str) {

			return '_' + str.toLowerCase();

		});

}
function formatCommand(command) {

	var line = underscore(command.command);

	if (command.target) {

		line += ' ' + string(command.target);

		if (command.value) {

			line += ', ' + string(command.value);

		}

	}

	return line;

}