Selenium Grid

Overview

• Describe what the grid is intended to solve, then get into how it solves it
• Going deeper into the funnel, how does it get its instructions, and how do they travel through its components?

Set-up

• We’ll start with the conventional setup of getting all the Grid components running on the same box, for simplicity.
• Different options and flags that can be used when starting the different Grid components.
• What kinds of logging are available, and how do they help in debugging and investigating problems?
• Overview of the different options available to customise the behaviour of the Grid. Short demo included.
• What is Docker?
• How do you setup a Grid using Docker?
• Using docker-compose to simplify the Grid setup process with Docker.

Running Tests

• Running a test locally vs running a test against a Grid. Conceptual differences.
• How do you run a test against a Grid running in Docker?
• How do you check the logs of tests on a Grid running in a containerised environment?

Advanced Grid

• How to build your own Docker image with custom browser versions
• Creating a hybrid Selenium Grid (Docker + a local IE/Safari node).
• Going deeper into customising the behaviour of the Grid. Exploring more use cases and examples.
• Approaches to scale up a Grid:
• Docker Swarm
• Kubernetes
• Containerising the whole environment for each test run
• Running tests in parallel against a scaled Grid
• Setting up a UI manager for all your Docker installations

Extras

• Selenium Grid on Amazon ECS using ecs-selenium
• Overview of third-party tools: Zalenium, SeleniumGridScaler, selenium-grid-extras

Prerequisites

• Docker
• Windows: https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/windows/
• This will include installing Hyper-V
• Mac: https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/mac/
• This will include installing the latest version of VirtualBox
• Linux Distributions: https://docker.github.io/engine/installation/linux/
• The requirements will vary depending on the flavor of Linux being used
• Selenium Standalone Server (latest): https://www.seleniumhq.org/download/
• You will also need the browser drivers and language bindings necessary for your target configuration, listed on this page: https://www.seleniumhq.org/download/
• Optional:
• If you intend to work with an auto-scaling Grid, an AWS account with full EC2 permissions.
• If you wish to work with the Kubernetes examples, either have a recent Docker installation with Kubernetes enabled or an account in the Google Cloud Platform. Also have Helm (https://helm.sh/) installed.
• It is also recommended that you have Eclipse or IntelliJ, a GitHub account if you want to try some projects mentioned in the extras, and an open USB port so participants can share files using a thumb drive.