What is selenium grid

The machine which actually triggers the test case known as Hub There can be only one hub in a selenium grid. The machine which is containing the hub triggers the test case, but you will see the browser being automated on other machines. Node Nodes are the selenium instances which will execute the test cases that you loaded on the hub. Note: When you are configuring nodes, you are running the test cases in different platforms.

There is no rule that if your hub is running the test in windows, then all nodes must be executing the test cases in windows only. Why Selenium Grid? Selenium Grid is useful because of the following reasons: Run on different platforms: You can run the test cases in different platforms, so it is a platform independent. For example, you have a hub which has internet explorer 9.

Hub has internet explorer 9 as many older websites support IE 9. Now we want to run the test cases in different platform such as Internet Explorer. As we know that only one version of a browser can be installed on a computer. You need to configure the node to which you want to send your test cases. Parallel execution: If you set up the Selenium Grid, you can run the multiple cases at the same time.

This saves time in running the test suites. It is available in a single jar file. Store the jar file at any of the drive. Open the cmd. Register the hub through cmd. Enter the command java -jar selenium-server-standalone This command will treat the machine as a hub. You can place the Selenium Server. After doing this, you are now done installing Selenium Grid. The following steps will launch the hub and the node.

Another way to verify whether the hub is running is by using a browser. Step 6 Go to the Selenium Grid web interface and refresh the page. You should see something like this. At this point, you have already configured a simple grid. You are now ready to run a test remotely on Machine B. To design test scripts that will run on the grid, we need to use DesiredCapabilites and the RemoteWebDriver objects.

Take note of the platform, and the browserName showed by the tooltip. We will use the platform and the browserName in our WebDriver as shown below of course you need to import the necessary packages first. Import the necessary packages for RemoteWebDriver and then pass the DesiredCapabilities object that we created above as a parameter for the RemoteWebDriver object. Once you run it, automation will be performed on Machine B. This command will launch the machine as a Selenium Grid hub on the default port To check if the hub is running, open a browser window and type the following URL:.

The IP address is the IP address of the machine wherein you have installed the hub and port is the hub port here. To know the IP address of the hub machine, simply type: ipconfig in the command prompt of the hub machine.

When you use multiple nodes, you can use the same command to register each node with the hub. By default, the grid allows 5 chrome browsers, 5 firefox browsers, and 1 IE browser. Now the grid hub and the node machines are configured and ready to use. While Selenium Grid is a powerful tool to perform test automation, cross-platform testing, and mobile testing, in particular, is only possible when you integrate mobile test automation frameworks such as Appium or Selendroid.

While Selendroid offers limited options, Appium is a robust framework but comes with a huge learning curve. The test environment setup requires a lot of time and effort.

You should develop reusable libraries. When testing hybrid apps with Appium, switching between the web and native views is repeatedly done. Web element identification is not easy too and doesn't work sometimes.

Test object identification is not available too. When it comes to performance, the selenium grid slows down with the increase in the number of nodes. At the same time, the test that executes on the local machine makes it hard to download or install additional software. Setting up the parallel testing environment is cumbersome too. Reporting and analytics is another key challenge. Selenium doesn't offer any reporting tool which means you can't generate comprehensive test reports for a holistic view of the test across the teams.

The reason why that matters is simple to understand: we have a lot of browsers and operating systems, and you need to ensure your application behaves as intended in all or at least the most used of those environments.

Older versions of Selenium Grid 1 to 3 used to be simpler in their architecture. The fourth version is a little more complex, but also more flexible and powerful. It offers a few different options you can choose to configure your grid installation: standalone, classical hub and nodes and fully distributed. The standalone mode allows you to execute a fully functional grid running all components on a single machine.

The classical mode is also called the hub and nodes mode. This setup is indicate for small and medium grids, and consists of setting up a server a hub and then one or more agents the nodes as needed.

The fully distributed mode is the setup recommended for large grids. This is the most advanced mode, and it requires you to start each component on its own. At the time of this writing, the latest version of Selenium is Selenium Grid 4.

Additionally, make sure you add the Java path to your PATH environment variable , so you can use the Java command from wherever you are. NET 5. Your next step is downloading the adequate WebDriver according to your operating system and the browser that will be automated. You can go to this page and download the correct version of the Chrome WebDriver according to the version of Chrome that you have installed. After downloading the executable, make sure to place it somewhere easily accessible and, most importantly, add that location to your system path.

Your next step is to download the Selenium Server. Since this is a. By default, Selenium Grid run on port If the command ran successfully, you should see success messages.

The image clearly shows that the node has 8 browsers configured: four Google Chrome and four Edge instances. You now have a successful Selenium Grid setup. The next logical step is to use that setup to execute some automation.