July 5, 2016

Selenium Conf India 2016 Talks: Placing Selenium Grid in a Docker Container

Selenium Conference India 2016 was held June 24, 2016 to June 26, 2016 in Bangalore. It's like Christmas for me, after every conference when they release the presentation slides the presenters used, indexing them all on the schedule at https://confengine.com/selenium-conf-2016/schedule. Simon Stewart, creator of WebDriver, gives his State of the Union. Automation developers showcase their work. You get to see what other automation developers are doing with the tool.

Videos usually are released a few weeks after the event.

I noticed that there were two talks and a workshop that dealt with a technology I was tinkering with for the past few months: Setting up Docker Containers. They were pairing Selenium with Docker to help them with testing.



Testing as a Container  

Using Docker with selenium and friends to ship fast
Presenter: Irfan Ahmad ( @critickarr ), from Upgrad
Website: http://critick.io/Testing-as-a-container/



Irfan talked about the idea of shipping Tests as Docker Containers instead of code. "Since Testers are responsible for reliability of their tests in the same way developers/dev-ops are responsible for their software but this is usually difficult, time consuming and needs collaboration with developers. Docker capabilities can help us in ensuring and enhancing reliability of our tests".

( This presentation is also where I first heard about installing Docker with the Docker Toolbox. I was so intrigued, I started playing around with it... )

He mentions that Docker can reduce the time of test execution, ease the setup of clean test environments and drastically reduce the differences between the development, acceptance and production environments leading to the higher quality of the released software. He gave examples to containerize entire testing stack together consisting of major automation tools like selenium.

On his GitHub site, TestStack https://github.com/irfanah/teststack, you can compare how much easier it is to setup his testing environment with Docker than it is without Docker.

Video of the Demo:



Cross-platform, Multi-device Instant Communication Testing in Parallel using Appium and Docker

Presenter: Vivek Upreti, Hike Messenger

Vivek's presentation talks about:


  • End-to-End testing on cross-platforms across multiple devices.
  • Driving different testing aspects in parallel.
  • How using Docker you can avoid the overhead of spawning one VM (heavy weight & time consuming) per device 

Vivek walks users through "Dockerizing" his tests in his Appium Docker Demo at
https://github.com/vbanthia/appium-docker-demo

... But what I am really looking forward to see what they post is for the...

Selenium Grid Workshop

Presenter: Luke Inman-Semerau, Salesforce
https://confengine.com/selenium-conf-2016/proposal/2307/grid-workshop

According to his notes he walks people through installing Docker and pulling into it:


He also uses:

Other Projects: Docker-Selenium


There is also a relatively new project SeleniumHQ's Docker-Selenium at https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/docker-selenium where they have Docker images for Chrome nodes, Firefox Nodes. It also walks you through setting up Selenium Grid Hub, nodes, etc.

Individual Docker images can be found at https://hub.docker.com/r/selenium/

... This, I definitely need to try out! ... and document ... and blog about.

Happy Testing!

-T.J. Maher
Sr. QA Engineer,
Fitbit-Boston

// BSCS, MSE, and QA Engineer since Aug. 1996
// Automation developer for [ 1.5 ] years and still counting!
// Check out Adventures in Automation and Like us on Facebook!
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