Zalenium in a minimal Docker Compose – Setup

What is Zalenium?

Zalenium, brought to us by German online fashion retailer Zalando, is a feature-enriched Selenium test platform based on the popular Selenium Grid. Besides the core features like scaling Selenium test execution nodes, it provides nice things like video recording, a video player directly in the management UI and integrations with popular browser test tools like Sauce Labs. For a more detailed overview, please check out the project page. As far as we are concerned here, we have all the good arguments we need to fire up a small test setup. 🙂

What are we going to do?

In the following miniworkshop, we temporarily slip into the shoes of a devops engineer and set up a minimal Zalenium Grid – environment in order to execute remote Selenium tests there. The goal is that we use no more than 2 files (of resonable size):

  • the docker-compose-file to build and start the Zalenium-container provided by Zalenium
  • a sample selenium-webdriver-test to be executed inside Zalenium, kindly provided by Felipe Almeida, thank you very much.

For our experiment, I modified the latter to enable remote driver execution instead of starting a local firefox. Therefore, I prepared everything in a small bitbucket-repo.

Prereqs for the Zalenium Setup

  • a recent version of Docker (should already include docker-compose)
  • Ruby > 2.3.1 (I recommend using RVM)
  • a recent Chrome-browser
    • Unfortunately, my Firefox (v67.0.4) does not support the video format of the test execution recordings. 🙁

Steps

  1. Open a terminal and clone the repo.
  2. cd inside the new directory and fire up the containers: $ docker-compose up -d
  3. Start the test: $ ruby selenium_minimal.rb
  4. After the test execution, open a Chromeand head to the Dashboard: http://localhost:4444/dashboard/
  5. You should see one test execution in the list on the left side. Click it.
  6. Play the video and enjoy the action of your test.

Conclusion

Now that you have the power to quickly fire up Zalenium and its grid nodes, you can go further. Host it on a remote machine serving your needs as a Test Automaton Engine, move it to the cloud and go to town. This should step up your Quality Assurance Game in a scalable and easily maintainable way. Have fun!

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