Automated Front End Test - Xvfb, Chromedriver, Selenium, Jenkins

1. Install Xvfbm, google-chrome-stable and chromedriver in Jenkins

sudo apt-get install -y xvfb google-chrome-stable

Down chromedriver from

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/

The current version running in my jenkins server is

Google Chrome version: 54.0.2840.100

Chrome driver version: 2.25

Selenium-Java version: 2.53.0

2. Start Xvfb

To start Xvfb by command line:

Xvfb :7 &

export  DISPLAY=:7

To start Xvfb for each maven buid

<profiles>
        <profile>
            <id>cit-environment</id>
            <activation>
                <activeByDefault>false</activeByDefault>
                <property>
                    <name>build.environment</name>
                    <value>jenkins</value>
                </property>
            </activation>
            <build>
                <plugins>
                    <plugin>
                        <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
                        <executions>
                            <execution>
                                <id>start-xvfb</id>
                                <phase>process-test-classes</phase>
                                <goals>
                                    <goal>run</goal>
                                </goals>
                                <configuration>
                                    <tasks>
                                        <echo message="Starting xvfb" />
                                        <exec executable="Xvfb" spawn="true">
                                            <arg value=":1" />
                                        </exec>
                                    </tasks>
                                </configuration>
                            </execution>
                            <execution>
                                <id>shutdown-xvfb</id>
                                <phase>test</phase>
                                <goals>
                                    <goal>run</goal>
                                </goals>
                                <configuration>
                                    <tasks>
                                        <echo message="Ending xvfb" />
                                        <exec executable="killall">
                                            <arg value="Xvfb" />
                                        </exec>
                                    </tasks>
                                </configuration>
                            </execution>
                        </executions>
                    </plugin>
                </plugins>
            </build>
        </profile>
    </profiles>

mvn clean install -Dbuild.environment=jenkins will trigger this plugin. Aslo remember to inject DISPLAY env variable during the build.

3. Issues Observed

Sometimes selenium just hangs on calling driver = new ChromeDriver(); So the current temporary solution is to try 10 times in a row to bring up chromedriver, and of course this is not nice.

Another issue is the page may be loaded too slow in Jenkins, causing the Selenium tests failure. Current temporary solution is to use wait.until method to wait untill an element is available.