Gitlab continuous integration testing with Selenium - selenium

Question

I am working on a project to build, test and deploy an application to the cloud using a .gitlab-ci.yml
1) Build the backend and frontend using pip install and npm install
build_backend:
image: python
stage: build
script:
- pip install requirements.txt
artifacts:
paths:
- backend/
build_frontend:
image: node
stage: build
script:
- npm install
- npm run build
artifacts:
paths:
- frontend
2) Run unit and functional tests using PyUnit and Python Selenium
test_unit:
image: python
stage: test
script:
- python -m unittest discover
test_functional:
image: python
stage: test
services:
- selenium/standalone-chrome
script:
- python tests/example.py http://selenium__standalone-chrome:4444/wd/hub https://$CI_BUILD_REF_SLUG-dot-$GAE_PROJECT.appspot.com
3) Deploy to Google Cloud using the sdk
deploy:
image: google/cloud-sdk
stage: deploy
environment:
name: $CI_BUILD_REF_NAME
url: https://$CI_BUILD_REF_SLUG-dot-$GAE_PROJECT.appspot.com
script:
- echo $GAE_KEY > /tmp/gae_key.json
- gcloud config set project $GAE_PROJECT
- gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file /tmp/gae_key.json
- gcloud --quiet app deploy --version $CI_BUILD_REF_SLUG --no-promote
after_script:
- rm /tmp/gae_key.json
This all runs perfectly, except for the selenium tests are run on the deployed url not the current build:
python tests/example.py http://selenium__standalone-chrome:4444/wd/hub https://$CI_BUILD_REF_SLUG-dot-$GAE_PROJECT.appspot.com
I need to have gitlab run three things simultaneously:
a) Selenium
b) Python server with the application
- Test script
Possible approaches to run the python server:
Run within the same terminal commands as the test script somehow
Docker in Docker
Service
Any advice, or answers would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I wrote a blog post on how I set up web tests for a php application. Ok PHP, but I guess something similar can be done for a python project.
What I did, was starting a php development server from within the container that runs the web tests. Because of the artifacts, the development server can access the php files. I figure out the IP address of the container, and using this IP address the selenium/standalone-chrome container can connect back to the development server.
I created a simple demo-project, you can check out the .gitlab-ci.yml file. Note that I pinned the selenium container to an old version; this was because of an issue with an old version of the php webdriver package, today this isn't needed anymore.