Running tests using gocept.selenium on Travis-CI

Travis-CI is a free hosted continuous integration platform for the open source community. It has a good integration with Github, so each push to a project runs the tests  of the project.

gocept.selenium is a python package our company has developed as a test-friendly Python API for Selenium which allows to run tests in a browser.

Travis-CI uses YML-Files to configure the test run. I found only little documentation how to run Selenium tests on Travis-CI. But it is straight forward. The following YML file I took from a personal project of mine. (I simplified it a bit for this blog post.):

language: python
python:
  - 2.6
before_install:
  - "export DISPLAY=:99.0"
  - "sh -e /etc/init.d/xvfb start"
  - "wget http://selenium.googlecode.com/files/selenium-server-standalone-2.31.0.jar"
  - "java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.31.0.jar &"
  - "export GOCEPT_SELENIUM_BROWSER='*firefox'"
install:
  - python bootstrap.py
  - bin/buildout
script:
  - bin/test

Explanation:

• Lines 1 – 4: My project is a Python project which currently only runs on Python 2.6. But other Python versions will work as well.
• Lines 5, 6: Firefox needs a running XServer, so we start it first as it takes some seconds to launch. See Travis-CI documentation, too.
• Lines  7, 8: The Selenium server seems not to be installed by default, so get it and launch it.
• Line 9: Tell gocept.selenium to use Firefox to run the tests. (Note: To use the new Webdriver-API in the upcoming version 2 of gocept.selenium you have to set other environment variables.)
• Lines 10 – 14: Install the project and run the tests as usual. (The example uses zc.buildout to do this.)

Note: Although I use the Firefox which is installed by default on the Travis-CI machine, I did not yet find out which version it is.

Author: Michael Howitz

I am a software developer at gocept in Halle (Saale). To develop software, I mainly use Python, Zope, ZTK and Django. View all posts by Michael Howitz