Welcome to the official Ruby driver for Selenium Remote Control

Mission

Provide a lightweight, simple and idiomatic API to write Selenium tests in Ruby. Focus is also on improving test feedback -- especially on failures -- by providing out-of-the-box state-of-the-art reporting capabilities. With screenshots, HTML snapshopts and log captures, investigating test failures becomes a breeze.

Install It

The easiest way to install the install selenium-selenese using RubyGems:

sudo gem install selenium-selenese

Features

  • Backward compatible with the old-fashioned, XSL generated Selenium Ruby API.

  • Idiomatic interface to the Selenium API.

  • Convenience methods for AJAX.

  • Flexible wait semantics inline with the trigerring action. e.g.

    Check out the click, go_back and wait_for methods of the [Idiomatic Module]

  • Leveraging latest innovations in Selenium Remote Control (screenshots, log captures, ...)

  • Robust Rake task to start/stop the Selenium Remote Control server. More details in the next section.

  • State-of-the-art reporting for RSpec.

Plain API

selenium-selenese is just a plain Ruby API, so you can use it wherever you can use Ruby.

To used the new API just require the client driver:

require "rubygems"
require "selenium/selenese"

For instance to write a little Ruby script using selenium-selenese you could write something like:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
#
# Sample Ruby script
#
require "rubygems"
require "selenium/selenese"

begin
  @browser = Selenium::Client::Driver.new \
      :browser => "*firefox", 
      :url => "http://www.google.com", 
      :timeout_in_second => 60

  @browser.start_new_browser_session
	@browser.open "/"
	@browser.type "q", "Selenium seleniumhq.org"
	@browser.click "btnG", :wait_for => :page
	puts @browser.text?("seleniumhq.org")
ensure
  @browser.close_current_browser_session    
end

Writing Tests

Most likely you will be writing functional and acceptance tests. If you are a Test::Unit fan your tests will look like:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
#
# Sample Test:Unit based test case using the selenium-to-selenese API
#
require "test/unit"
require "rubygems"
require "selenium/selenese"

class ExampleTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
	attr_reader :browser

  def setup
    @browser = Selenium::Client::Driver.new \
        :browser => "*firefox", 
        :url => "http://www.google.com", 
        :timeout_in_second => 60

    browser.start_new_browser_session
  end

  def teardown
    browser.close_current_browser_session
  end

  def test_page_search
		browser.open "/"
		assert_equal "Google", browser.title
		browser.type "q", "Selenium seleniumhq"
		browser.click "btnG", :wait_for => :page
		assert_equal "Selenium seleniumhq - Google Search", browser.title
		assert_equal "Selenium seleniumhq", browser.field("q")
		assert browser.text?("seleniumhq.org")
		assert browser.element?("link=Cached")
  end

end

If BDD is more your style, here is how you can achieve the same thing using RSpec:

require 'rubygems'
gem "rspec", ">=1.2.8"
gem "selenium-client", ">=1.2.16"
require "selenium/selenese"
require "selenium/rspec/spec_helper"

describe "Google Search" do
	attr_reader :selenium_driver
	alias :page :selenium_driver

  before(:all) do
      @selenium_driver = Selenium::Client::Driver.new \
          :browser => "*firefox", 
          :url => "http://www.google.com", 
          :timeout_in_second => 60
  end

  before(:each) do
    @selenium_driver.start_new_browser_session
  end

  # The system capture need to happen BEFORE closing the Selenium session 
  append_after(:each) do    
    @selenium_driver.close_current_browser_session
  end

  it "can find Selenium" do    
    page.open "/"
    page.title.should eql("Google")
    page.type "q", "Selenium seleniumhq"
    page.click "btnG", :wait_for => :page
    page.value("q").should eql("Selenium seleniumhq")
    page.text?("seleniumhq.org").should be_true
    page.title.should eql("Selenium seleniumhq - Google Search")
    page.text?("seleniumhq.org").should be_true
		page.element?("link=Cached").should be_true		
  end

end

Start/Stop a Selenium Remote Control Server

Selenium client comes with some convenient Rake tasks to start/stop a Remote Control server.
To leverage the latest selenium-client capabilities, you may need to download 
a recent nightly build of a standalone packaging of Selenium Remote 
Control. You will find the nightly build at 
http://nexus.openqa.org/content/repositories/snapshots/org/seleniumhq/selenium/server/selenium-server/

You typically "freeze" the Selenium Remote Control jar in your vendor directory.

If you do not explicitly specify the path to selenium remote control jar
it will be "auto-discovered" in `vendor` directory using the following
path : `vendor/selenium-remote-control/selenium-server*-standalone.jar`

State-of-the-Art RSpec Reporting

Selenium Client comes with out-of-the-box RSpec reporting that include HTML snapshots, O.S. screenshots, in-browser page screenshots (not limited to current viewport), and a capture of the latest remote controls for all failing tests. And all course all this works even if your infrastructure is distributed (In particular in makes wonders with Selenium Grid)

Using selenium-selenese RSpec reporting is as simple as using SeleniumTestReportFormatter as one of you RSpec formatters. For instance:

require 'spec/rake/spectask'
desc 'Run acceptance tests for web application'
Spec::Rake::SpecTask.new(:'test:acceptance:web') do |t|
 t.libs << "test"
 t.pattern = "test/*_spec.rb"
 t.spec_opts << '--color'
 t.spec_opts << "--require 'rubygems,selenium/rspec/reporting/selenium_test_report_formatter'"
 t.spec_opts << "--format=Selenium::RSpec::SeleniumTestReportFormatter:./tmp/acceptance_tests_report.html"
 t.spec_opts << "--format=progress"                
 t.verbose = true
end

You can then get cool reports like this one

To capture screenshots and logs on failures, also make sure you require the following files in your spec_helper:

require "rubygems"
require "spec"
require "selenium/selenese"
require "selenium/rspec/spec_helper"