Category Archives: Windows Batch Script

WIndows Batch Scripting

Virtualization using Vagrant for Selenium Tests

Say goodbye to “works on my machine” bugs.

Nobody likes to release software on a Friday. What if something breaks over the weekend? There’s nothing like debugging an issue in production when you’re doing some day drinking at a BBQ.

But you have nothing to worry about, right? I mean, you tested the application and it worked on *your* machine. Too bad that’s never good enough. Have fun working this weekend.

If only you had automated tests for your application (across all of the browsers and all the platforms you cared about). Then you could rest easy this weekend and enjoy the festivities.

Creating a robust and scalable execution environment for automation tests is a very essential phase. In automated tests for web, we actually need to cover different browsers and platforms.

In this documentation, we are going to see how to run our selenium tests in a Linux box using vagrant.

Basically I have a selenium test that works fine when running in different browsers in my Windows host machine. But I want to make sure that it is running fine on the browsers in a Linux box too. Instead of creating an actual VM and running my tests, I am simply going to create a light weight portable Linux box and I am going to run my selenium tests from my windows host machine.

Also every time that you want to run your tests in your local machine, it opens the browser on top of the other windows, preventing you from doing something else. Unless you use Phantomjs or HTMLUnitDriver, it is not possible to run Chrome or Firefox hidden, without disturbing you on your work. Now using Vagrant and VirtualBox, you only need to start the VM, and all your tests will be run into the VM. You can continue developing in the meanwhile!

WHY VAGRANT?

Vagrant provides us easy to configure, reproducible, and portable work environments. Vagrant stands on top of VirtualBox, VMware and some other service providers. If you’re a developer, Vagrant will isolate dependencies and their configuration within a single disposable, consistent environment. If you’re a tester, Vagrant will help you to create light weight Virtual environments to run your tests against all the possible OS + Browser combinations.

Prerequisites:

Download and install Oracle VM Virtualbox – https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
Download and install Vagrant – http://www.vagrantup.com/downloads

From command line, type vagrant –v and make sure that you get the version number that you installed. Vagrant 1.7.2

Vagrant Boxes:

Boxes are the package format for Vagrant environments. A box can be used by anyone on any platform that Vagrant supports to bring up an identical working environment. The easiest way to use a box is to add a box from the publicly available catalog of Vagrant boxes for VirtualBox. We can also add and share our own customized boxes on this website.

I am going to use this box chef/ubuntu-14.04 – a standard Ubuntu 14.04 x64 base install.

Getting Started:

Create a workspace directory to store the vagrant configuration file and shell scripts.

I have created “D:\Automation\Vagrant\Demo”

From Command line go to your workspace and type vagrant init chef/ubuntu-14.04

Make sure that the vagrant file is created in “D:\Automation\Vagrant\Demo”
Run the command vagrant up

If you are running this for first time, it may take some considerable amount of time to download the virtual box image and will put it under C:\Users\<username> \VirtualBox VMs\Demo_default_*

Now the Ubuntu base image VM is up and running. Run the Command vagrant halt. This will power off the VM. Because we need to provision this VM with selenium related libraries, browsers and some utilities to run our selenium tests.
Update the vagrant file in “D:\Automation\Vagrant\Demo” with the following content. Basically the default generated vagrant file has some lot of optional behaviors which are commented by default and you may enable it you need. But we require only the following content in a vagrant file.

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
   config.vm.box = "chef/ubuntu-14.04"
   config.vm.provision :shell, :path =&gt; "Provisioner.sh"
   config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest:4444, host:4444
end

Basically what we are trying to do above is enabling port forwarding in the VM. Selenium server will use the 4444 port by default and we are forwarding that port from VM to host machine.

Also we are going to provision this VM using the “Provisioner.sh” shell script. Provisioners in Vagrant allow you to automatically install software, alter configurations, and more on the machine, as part of the vagrant up process. This is useful since boxes typically aren’t built perfectly for your use case. Of course, if you want to just use vagrant ssh and install the software by hand, that works. But by using the provisioning systems built-in to Vagrant, it automates the process so that it is repeatable. Most importantly, it requires no human interaction, so you can vagrant destroy and vagrant up and have a fully ready-to-go work environment with a single command.

Vagrant gives you multiple options for provisioning the machine, from simple shell scripts to more complex, industry-standard configuration management systems. If you’ve never used a configuration management system before, it is recommended you start with basic shell scripts for provisioning.

So to run a selenium test in a new plain OS, we need following things.

JDK/JRE – To run the selenium server.
Google chrome browser
ChromeDriver
Some utilities like ‘Unzip’ to extract the chromedriver zip file.
Selenium Standalone Server
Xvfbor X virtual framebuffer – To run tests in headless mode.

Xvfb is a display server implementing the X11 display server protocol. In contrast to other display servers, Xvfb performs all graphical operations in memory without showing any screen output. So actually when we run our tests in a VM box, we won’t be able to see any browser popping up. It means no GUI interactions are possible. So I am going to install all the above packages along with the dependencies using Provisioner.sh

Create Provisioner.sh in the “D:\Automation\Vagrant\Demo” with the following content.


#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Set start time so we know how long the bootstrap takes

T="$(date +%s)"

#echo 'Updating'

sudo apt-get -y update

echo 'Installing Zip/Unzip'

sudo apt-get -y install zip unzip

echo 'Installing Google Chrome'

sudo apt-get -y install google-chrome-stable

wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

sudo apt-get -y install -f

echo 'Installing Google XVFB'

sudo apt-get -y install xvfb

sudo apt-get -y install -f

echo 'Installing JRE'

sudo apt-get -y install default-jdk

sudo apt-get -y install -f

echo 'Downloading and Moving the ChromeDriver/Selenium Server to /usr/local/bin'

cd /tmp

wget "http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/2.8/chromedriver_linux64.zip"

wget "https://selenium.googlecode.com/files/selenium-server-standalone-2.35.0.jar"

unzip chromedriver_linux64.zip

mv chromedriver /usr/local/bin

mv selenium-server-standalone-2.35.0.jar /usr/local/bin

export DISPLAY=:10

cd /vagrant

echo "Starting Xvfb ..."

Xvfb :10 -screen 0 1366x768x24 -ac &

echo "Starting Google Chrome ..."

google-chrome --remote-debugging-port=9222 &

echo "Starting Selenium ..."

cd /usr/local/bin

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.35.0.jar

# Print how long the bootstrap script took to run

T="$(($(date +%s)-T))"

echo "Time bootstrap took: ${T} seconds"

Run vagrant up –provision this will start the VM and then install the list of packages that we have added in the sh and also it will start the selenium server in 4444 port.

You can see this by navigating to http://localhost:4444/wd/hub/static/resource/hub.html from your windows host machine [As we have port forwarded].

Now run the following selenium test from any of your favorite IDE.

package test;

import java.net.URL;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver;

public class HeadlessSession {	  
	  public static void main(String args[]) throws InterruptedException, Exception {	  
		  HeadlessSession.HeadlessSessionId();
	  }
	  
	  public static void HeadlessSessionId() throws Exception {
               DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
	       capabilities.setBrowserName("chrome");
	       WebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(new URL("http://localhost:4444/wd/hub"), capabilities);	  
		  try {				
			    String baseUrl = "http://www.google.com";
			    driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(60, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
			    driver.get(baseUrl);
			    System.out.println("Title : " + driver.getTitle());
			    String browserName = capabilities.getBrowserName().toLowerCase();
			    System.out.println("Browser : " + browserName);
		  } catch (Exception e) {
			  System.out.println(e.getMessage());
		  }
		  finally {
		    driver.close();
		    driver.quit();
		  }
	  }
}

That’s it. Now you have successfully ran your tests in Chrome browser in a Linux box from your windows host machine.

Useful Vagrant Commands:

Command	Action
vagrant up	Power on the VM
vagrant halt	Power off the VM
vagrant reload	Restart
vagrant suspend	Saving the VM state and sleep
vagrant resume	Resuming the suspended VM
vagrant provision	Provision the VM by running the Provisioner.sh or any other shell script mentioned in the vagrant file.
vagrant up –provision	Power on with provision
vagrant reload –provision	Restart with provision

Pros:

Easy to setup and maintain.
It’s free.
Able to clone the production/staging environment for our test execution.
Light weight and portable.
Support to provisioning scripts like Shell, Chef, and Puppet.
Simple command line based workflow.
Goodbye to ‘Works on my machine’ bugs.
For selenium, you can able to run headless tests on your favorite browser.
Create and destroy the VMs as needed.
It works on all major platforms.
We can also use Selenium Grid along with vagrant to run tests parallely across different VM’s.

Cons:

Base boxes for your choice of operating system might not be readily available.
Little bit of time consuming to make vagrant VM up and running.
Taking lot of time when provisioning the VM box. To avoid this, create your own base box by installing all the required dependencies by manually SSH into it and then use provisioning script only for starting the Selenium Server.
Light weight. But looks fatty when considering the alternatives like Docker.
It requires you to have a hard drive file that can be huge and it takes a lot of RAM.

SoapUI Get SessionID

1 Reply

The whole purpose is, I have to automate testing for some Secured API’s, which need Session Id of my application to send request and to receive expected response.

I am using Soap-UI for my API Testing.

Initially I thought of using SoapUI to achieve the same. But my application uses SAML requests and do lot of redirection before getting into the Login Page.

So my alternative workaround is to go for the some other frameworks to fetch this session Id.

I have already discussed the same in the following post.

http://linkeshkannavelu.com/2014/02/13/selenium-webdriver-get-sessionid-from-a-web-application/

But in the above mentioned Post, I was using the FirefoxDriver. This will trigger the Firefox browser all the time and then it will fetch me the session information.

I somehow felt inside that this is not a proper workaround and always searched for the better alternative solutions.

Now I just want to let you know something that I have tried earlier to get the Session Cookie in headless mode without a browser.

Earlier I have tried out a solution to use the HTMLUnitDriver instead of FirefoxDriver to get the session information with a headless browser.

Initially I got lot of exceptions with earlier version of selenium standalone server.

But this works perfectly with the latest version of selenium. I really don’t know why.

Now the updated script will run in daemon mode and will fetch you the session id without a browser.

Obviously if you use HTMLUnitDriver, it will always throw severe bunch of warnings that you may not need.

All we need is just the session information of the application.

So, somehow I found out a way to turn off the HTMLUnitDriver logging just to avoid these bunch of severe warnings and unwanted information.

The following method will get you the SessionId of a web application.

I just pasted the method here. Of course you guyz may need to do some modification based on your needs.

You need to add the latest version of Selenium-Standalone-Server in your class path for this method to work.

public static void HeadlessSessionId() throws Exception {
		  WebDriver driver = new HtmlUnitDriver(true);
		  
		  try {		  	
			  	LogFactory.getFactory().setAttribute("org.apache.commons.logging.Log", "org.apache.commons.logging.impl.NoOpLog");
			    java.util.logging.Logger.getLogger("com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit").setLevel(Level.OFF);
			    java.util.logging.Logger.getLogger("org.apache.commons.httpclient").setLevel(Level.OFF);
				String domainString = ServiceEndPoint;		
			    String baseUrl = domainString;
			    driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(60, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
			    driver.get(baseUrl + "/Demo/");			    
			    driver.findElement(By.id("username")).clear();
			    driver.findElement(By.id("username")).sendKeys("UserName");
			    driver.findElement(By.id("password")).clear();
			    driver.findElement(By.id("password")).sendKeys("PassWord");
			    driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("input.primary.btn")).click();			    		    
			    String SessionId = driver.manage().getCookieNamed("sessionId").toString();			    
			    domainString = domainString.replaceAll("http://", "domain=");
			    String SessionID = ((SessionId).replaceAll("path=/;", " ")).replaceAll(domainString, "").replaceAll("Cookie: ", ""); 
			    Cookie = SessionID;
			    System.out.println(SessionID);
		  }
		  finally {
		    driver.close();
		  }
	  }

So That’s it. We have the session information of our application in Hand. Now how we are going to integrate this with our SoapUI?

During the development phase/when running my tests manually from SoapUI GUI, I have a project level property defined in SoapUI called “Cookie”.

And I will manually replace that project property with the session information that I got from my selenium script.

Later I will use this Project level Property in my SoapUI test cases/ test steps.

But as a automation engineer, at some point, I may want to add these tests in my Continuous Integration Server to run these tests on a nightly Builds.

At that time, there should not be any manual intervention in my automated tests.

So lets see how I actually integrated the session that I am getting it from Selenium with SoapUI.

All we need to do is simple.

Instead of printing the session Id, write it in a property file. I used to write this session Id in “SoapUIProjectProerties.props”

Export the entire Java project into a runnable Jar file.

If you are using any IDE like Eclipse, it is not that difficult task. Then create a Batch file that will do the following steps.

1. First run the Jar File and this will write the SessionID into that Property File.
2. Use SoapUI TestRunner Batch from Command Line and Specify it to load the Properties from the “SoapUIProjectProerties.props”

@ECHO OFF
SET SOAPUI_TEST_RUNNER="C:\Program Files (x86)\SmartBear\SoapUI-5.0.0\bin\"
java -jar HeadlessSessionId.jar
%SOAPUI_TEST_RUNNER%testrunner.bat -sTestSuiteName -r -a -j -f"Reports" -i Project-Name.xml 
-Dsoapui.properties.CommonAuthWebService=SoapUIProjectProerties.props

Now during the runtime, the session Id property defined in the property file will be used by SoapUI for hitting secured API’s.

I hope this solution might be helpful for your when automating secured API’s which need session Id.

My Colleague is working on another interesting solution to rewrite the whole Java program as a ‘Groovy Test Script’ in SoapUI.

I will let you know if that works. Thanks.

Delete a Windows Service

1 Reply

To delete a windows service running on your machine, use the following command in the command Prompt.

sc delete Servicename

For example, I am running Fitnesse – Acceptance testing Tool as a service in my machine.

If I want to remove this windows service from my machine,

sc delete Fitnesse

RoboCopy in Windows

1 Reply

Robocopy (Robust File Copy) is a command-line file copy utility.

To use this utility simple type the following command in the command prompt.

Robocopy C:\SourceFolder C:\DestinationFolder

This will copy the contents of the source folder to destination folder.

To copy all contents including empty directories of SourceFolder to DestinationFolder:

Robocopy C:\SourceFolder C:\DestDir /E

Redirecting Logs in Windows Batch File to a Log File

Keep Software Weird

Category Archives: Windows Batch Script

Virtualization using Vagrant for Selenium Tests

SoapUI Get SessionID

Delete a Windows Service

RoboCopy in Windows

Redirecting Logs in Windows Batch File to a Log File

UNIX BASICS

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