My Python application has windows is client and server as Linux. My aim is to automate windows GUI application with pywinauto from Linux server.
Can pywinauto be made cross platform?
It's not possible using pywinauto immediately. But you may copy pywinauto script to the target Windows machine and run it remotely using Jenkins, for example. Or any other CI server. Master node can be on Linux. So Windows node can run as a slave. But there are several requirements for the Windows slave (this check list is based on my recent experience).
Windows slave can be set up with auto logon.
VNC server software (TightVNC or UltraVNC, for example) should be installed.
Video card drivers should be up-to-date for better screen resolution (and for black screen prevention).
Jenkins slave process must run as not a service (i.e. in the existing desktop, so Jenkins task would have an access to the GUI). Just do NOT click menu "Run as a service" in JNLP agent window.
Do not use Remote Desktop connection from another Windows machines (reboot may be required to restore GUI session with VNC client/server pair).
Of course, Python+pywinauto must be installed on Windows node. Just in case.
If UAC is enabled on Windows node, in some cases it should be disabled (if you have to deal with admin access like GUI installers do).
On Linux you need to set up the VNC client and Jenkins. For other CI servers steps may be similar but with some differences.
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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.
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'm trying to automate some selenium tests.
I can run them locally in my machine, but when I try to run them in windows server 2008 (the server in which our CI server runs) the Firefox window only opens if I open the cmd line with admin privileges. I don't wan't this to run with admin privileges, so the question is: what do I need to do to be able to open Firefox window with a regular user?
There is nothing you can do about that. Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft locked down the "interactable" sessions and so running WebDriver grid hub as a service which starts browsers in a desktop session will not work unless you are using Windows XP. So, what you need to do is have multiple grid nodes running in the foreground and leave those desktop sessions open in Windows 2008. Also, with Jenkins, running Selenium tests (without a grid) will exhibit the same problem where you'd have to run Jenkins in the foreground.
Windows says "By default, services use a noninteractive window station and cannot interact with the user. However, an interactive service can display a user interface and receive user input.". Also, "All services run in Terminal Services session 0. Therefore, if an interactive service displays a user interface, it is visible only to the user who connected to session 0. " See this site for this info.
The holy grail would be to write a Java program using SystemTray and then have the tray application auto-start a grid node session in the foreground when a desktop session starts. Just an idea since VisGrid cannot do this.
On Linux, there is a way to use xvfb to run grid as a service and run browsers in a headless session, but its a complex setup I think and I have never tried it. It's not very much different that the Windows situation anyway and I think the windows setup is easier.
I configured Jenkins as Selenium Grid and some Jenkins Nodes as Selenium Nodes (controlled by Jenkins Selenium plugin).
The nodes are connected with the option "Let Jenkins control this Windows Slave as Windows Service".
The service is defined automatically at the node as "interact with desktop".
Jenkins slave enables Selenium remote driver service
The problem is that the resolution of UI tests is really low (1036 x 780) where we need (1600x1200).
Opening an RDP session doesn't help since the service was started by Jenkins.
How to change the default resolution of windows service that can interact with Desktop?
I had the same problem as yours. Difference was I also have GUI automation besides Selenium tests. I ended up installing VNC service on all the nodes and wrote a script to change the desktop resolution before running any tests. However the highest resolution by doing that we got is 1280x1024, which resolved my problem.
If you don't mind giving up running Jenkins Slave as Windows Service you can use this way:
Jenkins on Windows and GUI Tests without RDC
Still - that would make you maintain an open RDP session that runs Jenkins JNLP process... So that solution is working, but not very optimal.
Which options do we have to do automated UI testing on remote computers connected via RDP, if I don't want to install anything on the remote computer?
My only idea is to open the rdp session always in the same way and use recorded mouse and key strokes, but there are some disadvantages, e.g. I assume it's slow?
Anyways, do you know any open source or proprietary tools I can use? Best would be that I have to install nothing on the remote machine and play the record on my local machine.
Starting with UFT 11.50 (previously known as QTP) there is support for image based testing.
You can have one machine with UFT installed and replay on other machines via RDP using Insight UFT's image based automation solution.
eggPlant Functional allows you to automate the UI of any app on Windows machines using an RDP connection. It's pretty fast assuming you are connecting over a decent network, and you don't need to install anything additional on the target machine.