Need a machine to run selenium Grid test cases

Question

I would like to check my selenium grid test cases on a server(any machine other than localhost).I need chrome , firefox and IE browsers in the server. Is there any way to do this ? I checked few sites like koding.com , but it is only offering me unix interface,I need full windows/Ubuntu interface. Please let me know if there is any other method to execute my test cases ?

Answer 1

VirtualBox is good and works well for grid tests, I expect it to be a fairly common solution. Same IP is not a problem as you make it work with port forwarding on your desktop. For example you should manage to build a grid like the following:

1. -role hub on your Windows host on port 4444
2. -role node on an Ubuntu VM with port forward 5556 in VirtualBox, for Firefox
3. -role node on an OSX VM with port forward 5557 in VirtualBox, for Safari
4. -role node on a Windows VM with port forward 5558 in VirtualBox, for IE and Chrome
5. node with socat+flynnid.py on an Android emulator with port forward 5559
6. maybe also iPhone Simulator from inside OSX VM (I don't remember if I made it work with grid)

Answer 2

The Selenium Grid "user interface" as you say, is the same , whether it is Linux or Windows. The only difference is that on Linux you won't have an IE driver.

What you do is run a Grid Hub on your local machine and then register "Node" servers on each remote machine. Each Node server can run any combination of web browsers that you mentioned and it is also capable of running them simultaneously (if your test suite was programmed carefully).

The .jar file that you start the Grid Hub with is the same .jar file you use to start the Nodes. The only difference is that each Node will have a .json config file with it that explains the configuration of that server such as where the IE and Chrome binary files are located at on the remote server, what browsers it supports, and how many threads it can handle.

Look at the documentation I wrote (for Grid hub config) on the GitHub "Selenium documentation" site.