I recently started evaluating Rundeck for our runbook automation needs. However I found that it works on SSH based connection method and our endpoints where we want to perform automation is in our customer locations. So I was hoping that it has an agent which we will install on those Windows 10 IoT based endpoints and then perform the runbook automation task remotely, but it appears that there is no agent for Rundeck.
Anyone made it work with such arrangements?
Rundeck is an agentless solution, for Windows based machines/servers Rundeck uses the PyWinRM (Python WinRM) plugin out of the box. Check the requirements, configuration, node definition and a good job example.
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I want to get the deployment method using Powershell for Self-Hosted Integration Runtime.
The requirement is to track whether the SHIR is installed using "Powershell" commands Or its done through the Azure Portal by a human user by manual steps.
Is there any Flag in Azure which indicates the method of the resource deployment? i.e. if its a PowerShell/ARM template/Portal deployment?
Self-Hosted Integration runtime is a service installed on a windows operating machine (the only OS supported now) either on cloud(VM) or on-prem. Closest you can get to its details is under Applications and Services Logs on system Event Viewer, here you can Filter Logs for timestamp between Start and End of your ADF Pipeline.
Additionally, if you feel this is not helpful, you can share your Feedback so the product team can look into this idea. ✌
Apologies if similar has been asked before, I couldn't seem to find anything, just link me in the right direction if so.
I'm brand new to test automation, I will be writing selenium tests against a third party website hosted on an internal network. Our source control is provided by Visual Studio Team Services, although it is possible I can install TFS on premise.
Eventually I need to schedule test runs, I believe all this can be done with team services, seen some demo's, all good.
I will be using a URL to access the system under test which is on our internal network, if team services tries to run a selenium test and connect to the URL it will fail I imagine as it's running from wherever Microsoft are holding the code and building.
I don't think there would be a chance that we would allow Team services any access to our internal network if that was even possible.
So the question is, what are my options? can the build be moved from VS Team Services onto a local machine to run the tests with the internal URL? Is this a good idea if it can? Am i relying too much on the internet for testing on our internal network and is this a risk?
I have spent a bit of time on "the google" but struggling to find a great deal of information, it's possible I am asking the wrong questions.
Any help is greatly appreciated, links to articles are fine, don't mind doing the leg work, just need some pointers.
Many thanks for your help, apologies if any of that makes no sense.
You have a few options:
Install a VSTS Build agent on-premise and connect it to VSTS. The agent connects to VSTS using an outbound connection and it will be able to execute Builds and Release pipelines and from there orchestrate the execution of tests. You can either put this agent in a specific Agent Pool or Agent Queue, or you can add a Capability to it (e.g. "onprem"). By setting the Build Definition to use the specified Pool/Queue the agent will be selected. Or by adding the Demand "onprem" to your Build Definition it will ensure that it always requires that capability of any agent.
Use TFS 2015u3 or TFS2017 with the same agent, but that would mean you loose all the goodness that VSTS has to bring with regards to licenses, "free upgrades" and all.
With regards to security.
Adding a agent to your network that executes commands queued on a cloud service adds a risk. You can minimize that risk by configuring the build agent with a limited account, use Active Directory to limit the machines this user can run processes on/logon to and you can limit the access to this agent through permissions on the Queue and Pool as well. You can ensure that the users who have access to this pool and all your VSTS administrators have configured 2-factor-authentication on their AAD account and if needed add IP access control to these accounts as well. It's recommended that users that administer such agent pools/queues do not have alternate credentials configured and that the Personal Access Token used to register the agent is scoped to the permissions required to do just that.
With these extra measures in place you'll have a pretty secure setup. And it beats the hassle of having to install, backup, maintain a couple of TFS servers on-premise.
I am looking for ways to set up like a central 'hub' for Selenium in my work, allowing anyone to access in within the company. For example, Tester A writes test scripts, the Person B can run without having to manually copy over the test scripts to their local workstation)
So far, I've only thought of installing Selenium in a VM which will then execute as per normal. But if I run Selenium Grid, it will run VMs within VM (?). My only concern with VMs is that it'd run slowly.
If anyone can think of a better solution or recommendation please do give me some advice. Thank you in advance.
One idea. You can create an infrastructure combining Jenkins/Selenium/Amazon.
The following is my solution from another post.
You can do it with a grid.
First of all you need to create a Selenium hub with an EC2 ubuntu 14.04 AMI without UI and link it as a jenkins slave to your Jenkins master. Or as directly a master. What you want. Only command line. Download Selenium Server standalone. (be careful on downloading the version. If you Download the Selenium3Beta, things could change). Here you can configure the HUB. You can also add the Selenium Hub as a service and configure to run automatically at server start. its important that you open the Selenium default port (or the one that you configured) so the nodes can connect to it. You can do that on the Amazon EC2 console when you have created your instance. You just need to add a security group with an inbound rule for TCP in the port you want for the IPs you want.
Then, you can create a Windows server 2012 instance server (for example, that's what I did), and do the same process. Download the same version for Selenium and the chromedriver (there is no need to download any firefoxdriver for Selenium versions before Selenium3). Generate a txt file and prepare the Selenium command to link to the HUB as a NODE. And convert it to *.bat in order to execute it. If you want to run the bat at start you can create a service with the task scheduler or use NSSM (https://nssm.cc/). Don't forget to add the rules to the security groups for this machine too!
Next, create the Jenkins server. You can use the Selenium Hub as the Jenkins master or as a slave.
Last step is configuring a job to be run in the Jenkins-Selenium machine. This job needs to be linked to your code repository (git, mercurial...) Using the parametrized build plugion for jenkins you can tell that job to pull the revision you want (where every developer can pull the revision with the new changes and new tests) and run the Selenium tests in that build with the current breanch/revision and against one unique selenium. You can use ANT or Maven to run the Selenium tests in Jenkins.
May be it's complicated to understand because there are so many concepts here but it's robust and it works fine!
If you have doubts, tell me!
If Internet Explorer is not one of the browsers on which you must run your automation tests, I would recommend that you consider docker selenium.
Selenium is providing pre-configured docker images for both Selenium Hub and Node ( refer here for more information ). For making use of docker selenium all you need to do is find a machine (preferably unix machine), install docker on it by following instructions detailed here and then start the hub and node by starting off those containers. In the case of docker you can literally transform a VM (or) a physical machine into a VM farm and yet not have to worry about slowness etc., because I believe docker is optimised for these and it runs your VM as a process.
Resorting to using Amazon cloud for running your selenium nodes is all fine, but if you have corporate policies that prevent in-coming traffic from the internet into your intranet region, then I am not sure how far Amazon cloud would be useful.
Also remember that Jenkins is not something that is absolutely required but is more of a good to have part in the setup because it would let anyone run their tests from a web UI. This will however require that all your tests are checked-in and made available in a central version control system in your organization.
PS : The reason why called out Internet Explorer as an exception is because IE runs only on windows and there are no docker images (yet) for windows. All the docker images are UNIX based images.
So that we may perform front-to-back web UI testing, we are using Selenium and ChromeDriver to automate page loads/interaction as part of our testing pack.
This is behaving as expected during developer testing (on a developer's local machine), but we are struggling to perform these checks as part of our continuous integration build.
Our server plant is *NIX based, and all of our CI infrastructure runs on these machines. So that we may test Chrome under Windows (our delivery mechanism), we have configured a Selenium Grid. When the CI tests run, they access the grid, in order to locate a Windows node to run the tests on.
We have had a Windows desktop provisioned solely for the purpose of running these tests. This contains our standard enterprise build of Windows 7. This machine will be periodically rebooted in-line with the IT department's update policy.
In an effort to ensure the Selenium server is always running, we have added the Selenium Server (running in "node" mode) as a Windows service. The selenium Server is configured to start-up ChromeDriver to invoke the simulated user-interaction.
However, when running the tests from CI they fail due to timeout. Our working theory is, the system user that is running the service cannot create interactive windows. A web search has raised reference to the "Session 0" problem, but with little to no constructive advice on how to move forward.
Starting the Selenium Server process manually from an interactive session is not a viable solution, as this is leading to brittle tests - which are failing due to an infrastructure problem, rather than a genuine test regression.
How can we have an instance of Selenium Server started via a Windows Service whenever the system reboots, that is capable of launching Chrome instances?
It could be easily done with NSSM.
Installation of services looks like these:
nssm install seleniumhub java -jar C:\selenium\selenium-server-standalone-2.45.0.jar -role hub -hubConfig C:\selenium\hub.json
nssm install seleniumnode java -jar C:\selenium\selenium-server-standalone-2.45.0.jar -role node -nodeConfig C:\selenium\node.json
It provides easily way to remove service if needed:
nssm remove seleniumnode confirm
Add destination to nssm to your PATH variable and run from console as admin
UPDATE April 2021
NSSM is not supported for more than 3 years. So please consider other options like winsw or any other. WinSW does the same job as NSSM and allows to keep run configuration in xml.
You cannot run Selenium Grid as a windows service ever since Windows Vista. Microsoft calls it "Session 0 Isolation". You could do it in Windows 2000 or XP but since the time that Vista came out, Microsoft no longer will let Grid interact with the desktop (or any other UI programs for that matter). Regardless of the fact that you still see that "interact with desktop" checkbox, it is a red herring. So, you MUST run Selenium Grid in the foreground on that server in order for it to get access to the session. If it is running Windows Server, you could in theory have multiple sessions and leave Grid running in the foreground on one of the non-zero user sessions.
Right now you can't help it - it used to work fine in session 0 but for the past few days after chrome update only works for interactive sessions.
Related bugs:
https://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=8029
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=422218
My preferred solution to this problem (and my default choice for running Selenium Grid as a service) is to use a simple tool called AlwaysUp. It has a free 30 day trial to try it out.
What to do:
Download AlwaysUp
Configure AlwaysUp to start the Selenium Grid node on startup
Configure AlwaysUp to run the Selenium node as a specific user (not the default System user)
This way the the node will run as a service, survive machine restarts and work with the latest version Chrome.
If the user account you use to login to the machine is different from the user account you specify to run the node as a service then you will not see the browsers pop up on the desktop as they are running in a different user session. The end result is that it is almost identical to running as a normal service but gets round the Session 0 issue.
Yeah, you should use NSSM. Important is, that you add your windows account in the "Log on" tab, or any other valid account. If you run your node with the "Local System account" option, you will get the session 0 problem. With a normal user session, the nodes run smoothly invisible in the background :)
we don't use selenium GRID, we were disappointed with its stability. We use a "Jenkins Grid", that is jenkins slaves nodes on various servers.
The slaves are services with the interact with desktop flag. They run as services with NSSM, and the SERVICE_INTERACTIVE_PROCESS flag. Making sure that NoInteractiveProcess is set to 1 (cf https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/services/interactive-services).
We don't have the fancy features of the grid (that is balancing according the browser types slots). Instead, we have Jenkins balancing the test jobs using a slave node or another.
Initially we did not use the interact with desktop flag, having browsers to run without "real" display, but the behavior was not very stable (especially with resize commands).
Hope this helps.
As I explained on this thread, I found that using a small paid tool FireDaemon Pro saved me a lot of time from trying to configure NSSM and other free tools.
It works well in the background, and restarts Selenium along with the server, which was my main requirement for running Selenium Standalone Server as a Windows Service.
This free tool would probably do it:
http://yajsw.sourceforge.net/
For that to work, you need a wrapper.conf file and a script to run the YAJSW wrapper. I takes time to read the documentation, but it is a free solution.
I wrote an example shared here, that installs JBoss7 as a Windows service.
Of course, you can simplify my example by a lot.
I have two jobs in Jenkins. One for build and the other for deployment.
Once the build job is successful i create a build tag and publish it on Github.
Next i take that tag and deploy those artifacts using publish over ssh plugin and selecting the option send files or execute commands over ssh as my post build step. I am also adding the already configured server at this step.
Now my concern is in some cases server details are not informed i.e username/password well in advance.
Is there a feature in Jenkins which can ask me to enter servername/username/password for deploying? Can i have a parametrized build having these 3 fields as inputs? So that when i click "build now" in deployment job it asks for these fields.
The publish over SSH plugin is designed to use credentials previously setup and managed by Jenkins. This is necessary because Jenkins managed the distribution of credentials when you run builds on slave nodes.
As an alternative solution that you could consider is using the Rundeck plugin. Rundeck is an general purpose automation tool, similar to Jenkins but focused on general purpose automation. The advantage is that you can use dedicated tools for build and deployment (useful when you have separate Dev and Ops teams) and Rundeck is better suited to managing large numbers of run-time servers.