I have my robotframework setup on my PC.
I would like to connect to a remote windows client, have it open a browser and access a URL.
Verify that the pages has loaded.
Pretty basic but since I am new to RF, I wanted to know how that would work.
For Linux machines, I would use the SSHLibrary and just execute commands (wget) but for the windows machine, I need to use the browsers.
Do I need RF installed on the destination client RDP?
Do I need the webdrivers for each browser on the client RDP?
How would I go about logging in the Windows machine through RDP?
After Logging in with RDP, I run the same "open broswer" with broswer and URL?
Thanks!!!
The use case you describe - a browser to be opened & controlled on a remote machine, is precisely what Selenium solves.
Though in day-to-day work or debugging we are usually starting a local browser, SE is preliminary designed for remote execution. So head to www.selenium.dev, and focus on the Grid - that's the component you are after.
I'm that approach, answers to your specific questions:
no, you need Robot Framework and selenium library on the local machine, and only selenium & webdriver on the remote.
you don't need the drivers on the client - the selenium library is all you communicate with in your code; you need them installed in the remote only.
on the local you will get the logs of the webdriver commands execution; actual browser manipulation logs are only on the remote and the hub (but these are really debugging ones, everything high-level for the functional execution is local).
you don't really log into RDP with this approach (RDP is totally out of the picture here), and yes - your code is the same as running on local browser - Open Browser, Get Text, etc - but, executed on a remote machine.
If you want to see why 1) and 2), head to the answer over here (shameless plug 🙂)
Related
I've been working with Selenium for a few years already.
I started with some little stuff in Java and in my previous job I did a project using C# bindings with SpecFlow framework, page objects model, I dealt with complex locators, some JavascriptExecutor even some browsermobproxy work, bottom line I have some experience with Selenium.
Still there is something that is not clear to me.
Is Selenium expected to work properly when there is no "interactive session" into the machine that is running the code ?
Let's say that I connect into remote desktop to a machine in the cloud (Let's say Amazon or Azure), I develop a script and schedule a windows job to run it on the next 10 minutes, then I disconnect from the remote desktop session, the machine is on but no user is connected to it in remote desktop.
Will the script work ? Or depends what does it do ? Might some of the actions not work (Script might include changing the window size, sending keystrokes both through selenium sendkeys and by OS level actions) ? Can we ensure that any script that we developed and works OK while we are connected to the machine will also work when I'm not ?
I hope the question is clear, if not I can maybe explain further
Thanks !!!
Yes, Selenium can run on the cloud machine even though you are not connected to it. It should work without any issue.
As per my knowledge cloud machines are protected by firewall which blocks almost all the ports. You may need to get permission to use the default selenium ports like 4444 or 5555.
Also, may need to increase wait time because the cloud machines are slow in performance compared to normal physical desktop.
Usually cloud machines are linux based, you need to consider the environment as well.
We are attempting to do our testing remotely, so we set up some Virtual Machines to run our GUI tests and to free up our local machines. What we were hoping for was to have the tests run just like they would on a physical machine, however they seem to require an active Remote Desktop Connection up in order to run properly. These tests are written using LeanFT and it is a windows app so this is not mobile GUI testing.
Is there a certain way to configure this VM to set it up properly for automated GUI testing that does not require an active Remote Desktop Connection? It seems as if its sharing the controls on our physical machine..
Or am I completely wrong here.. Is a Remote Machine different than a Virtual Machine? Thanks!
It's possible to run a GUI test without an active Remote Desktop Connection
I achieved this with leanft through the following 2 steps:
Configure how you execute your tests
Whether you're running via a Jenkins slave or through another kind of "listener" (maybe ssh, or bamboo, etc.), you need to configure this listener to start after a specific user is logged on.
In my case I was running through the Jenkins slave, so I've configured the startup of the slave to launch as soon the user logged in.
Tell windows to login the user when the computer starts. You can achieve that via the following registry:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
"DefaultDomainName"="DOMAIN"
"DefaultUserName"="USERNAME"
"AutoAdminLogon"="1"
"DefaultPassword"="PASSWORD"
The core requirement is that you need to have an active session (regardless of whether you are using Jenkins, TeamCity, Grid or other tools to launch the tests).
For your virtual machine, you will need to have access to the console. For VMWare vSphere, there is a native client or website. For VMWare Workstation or VirtualBox, these automatically display.
Using the console access, log into the system and set it up to never log out or sleep or hibernate. This is a variety of OS settings that you can look up.
Essentially, these boxes need to always be logged in. With this setup, you need to be sure access to these systems is controlled so that you don't have random people logging in / or logging out.
I have done my automation in Robotframework and I am using many libraries like Selenium2Library, Sikuli Library, HTTP Library, OS library and few more.
When I am running test on Selenium Grid, it invokes the browser on node and runs those steps which are from Selenium.
However, it does not run commands from Sikuli Library. Is selenium grid capable of running keywords from different libraries?
No, the selenium grid only works with selenium. The selenium grid is a server much like a web server. It listens for specific commands, and performs those commands. It will only respond to commands from selenium clients.
When using Sikuly in Robot Framework it is necessary to first setup the external sikuly server and then connect to it from Robot Framework. Typically this is a localhost connection, but connecting to an external host is also possible.
When using Selenium Grid, a connection is made to an anonymous node and thus the host to which the Sikuly server is runnning as well. Did a quick check in google and found that getting the hostname/IP of the running node from the hub is possible. Using the code example here I think it should be possible to create a direct connection to the Sikuly server.
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.
The issue is that Sikuli's image recognition capabilities only work when the target of the Sikuli tests is in the foreground and it has full access to the mouse. In its current configuration, Jenkins projects are never visible from the desktop of the windows slave node.
The way my current automated testing suite is setup right now, about 30 tests are written using only selenium. In the final two tests, selenium starts a webdriver (currently chromedriver but can be firefox or IE) and navigates to the right pages and Sikuli does its thing from there. Both use the java language bindings.
Currently Sikuli appears to be installed correctly, but when it is asked to click through a list of screenRegions supposedly populated by matching the desktop with a target image, it immediately throws a NPE.
How do I change my Jenkins setup on my windows 7 slave to allow the browser to be launched in the foreground, as it is when i run it from my windows 7 development machine?
So you've got a development machine where Sikuli works, and a test machine where Jenkins runs Sikuli and it doesn't work.
I had this same setup (with the Sikuli tester/Jenkins slave running Windows 7). What worked for me was to have the test machine run a VNC server, log in as a the tester account over VNC, and launch the Jenkins slave as a regular application and not a service. I used UltraVNC server.
As far as I could tell, the problem stems from Windows' security measures, which are designed to prevent a remote user from controlling your machine without your presence.
If you run Jenkins as a service, it doesn't get a real desktop allocated to it. The script will run, but (as you're seeing) Sikuli won't actually be able to find anything because there's nothing for it to look at. (Selenium is inspecting the page content programmatically, so it doesn't mind that the page is not actually displayed on any screen.)
You can also just run Jenkins and leave yourself logged in, and skip the VNC server. I wanted to run the machine without a monitor or keyboard and still have control, though. If that's your goal as well, you can't use Remote Desktop, because it allocates a new desktop on connection and then destroys it when you disconnect. (So Jenkins will work when you're watching and fail when you leave for the night. Very frustrating!)
As a side benefit, if you do it this way you can connect over VNC and watch Jenkins as it's running the test.
make the slave machine remote desktop to itself.
run the jenkins salve as program in that session
cmd /c start java -jar slave.jar -jnlpUrl http....slave-agent.jnlp -secret ... (find it in your jenkins master (shown when the slave service is down)
set it all to run at salve win startup.