Use Remote Webdriver in Selenium

Introduction

This article describe how to use Remote WebDriver to run Web Driver on remote machine.

Note:
Environments:
Test Machine -  Ubuntu 14.04, rails 4.1
Remote Server - Windows 8.1, IE11

Pre-Request

Make sure you have set up Selenium correctly
Rails, minitest and Selenium

Steps

On the remote server (e.g., windows 8.1 NB)

0. make sure Java JRE is installed

1. Download selenium-server-standalone-2.46.0.jar from
http://selenium-release.storage.googleapis.com/index.html
selenium-server-standalone-2.46.0.jar

2. Download and extract chrome driver and IE driver
chrome driver
http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html
chromedriver_win32.zip

IE driver
http://selenium-release.storage.googleapis.com/index.html
IEDriverServer*.zip

Note:

Basically you should choose 32 bit or 64 bit version of IE Driver according to your OS version, but you can try to switch version if you find send_keys pretty slow.

3. Open console, run selenium-server-standalone-2.46.0.jar by

# update path/filename as needed
java -jar -Dwebdriver.ie.driver="D:/things/Downloads/IEDriverServer.exe" -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver="D:\things\Downloads\chromedriver.exe" D:\things\Downloads\selenium-server-standalone-2.46.0.jar

4. Make sure that Internet Options → Security has the same Protected Mode setting (on or off, it doesn't matter as long as it is the same value) for all zones.

On the testing machine (Ubuntu 14.04 this case)

1. Add remote browsers to test_helper.rb

# Capabilities for IE driver
iecaps = Selenium::WebDriver::Remote::Capabilities.internet_explorer
# need to ignore zoom or it will
# complain zoom is 250% but it should be 100%
# on IE11/Windows 8.1
iecaps["ignoreZoomSetting"] = true;
# ...
@@remoteBrowsers = [
  { "url" => "http://192.168.31.169:4444/wd/hub",
      "desired_capabilities" =>  iecaps},
  # assume also want to test remote chrome
  { "url" => "http://192.168.31.169:4444/wd/hub",
      "desired_capabilities" =>  :chrome },
]
# ...
def self.remoteBrowsers
  @@remoteBrowsers
end

2. Generate test case

bin/rails generate integration_test remote_webdriver

3. Write test case

require "test_helper"

class RemoteWebdriverTest < ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
  def test_sanity
    ActiveSupport::TestCase.remoteBrowsers.each do |remoteBrowser|
      driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for(:remote, :url => remoteBrowser["url"], :desired_capabilities => remoteBrowser["desired_capabilities"])
      doTest(driver)
    end
  end
  def doTest (driver)
    driver.navigate.to "http://google.com"
    element = driver.find_element(:name, 'q')
    element.send_keys "Hello WebDriver!"
    element.submit

    puts driver.title

    sleep 2
    # quit driver, close browser window
    driver.quit
  end
end

4. Run test case

rake test test/integration/remote_webdriver_test.rb

References

Selenium wiki RubyBindings

InternetExplorerDriver Zoom Level Error - Stack Overflow

How to set path for IE driver for a remote machine while using remotewebdriver from the code

Updated / Added Files

test_helper.rb

 remote_webdriver_test.rb