Basic Capybara-Gauge: Add Chrome and ChromeDriver logging capabilities

This is the sixth part of a series of blog posts. Care to go back to the beginning? 

Want to view JavaScript errors in Chrome? Or see if your Selenium WebDriver instance is throwing any errors? Check out the Logging Preference Capabilities from the Chromium project.

With this article, we will demonstrate how to get these logs set up in your Capybara-Ruby project, and what to add in the spec_helper.rb file we created.

What is Chromium?

"Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web. This site contains design documents, architecture overviews, testing information, and more to help you learn to build and work with the Chromium source code".

What are Capabilities?

From Capabilities and Chrome Options, on the Chromium.org website:

"Capabilities are options that you can use to customize and configure a ChromeDriver session. This page documents all ChromeDriver supported capabilities and how to use them.

"The WebDriver language APIs provides ways to pass capabilities to ChromeDriver. The exact mechanism differs by the language, but most languages use one or both of the following mechanisms:

"Use the ChromeOptions class. This is supported by Java, Python, etc.

• "Use the DesiredCapabilities class. This is supported by Python, Ruby, etc. While it is also available in Java, its usage in Java is deprecated.
• "Using the ChromeOptions class

"You can create an instance of ChromeOptions, which has convenient methods for setting ChromeDriver-specific capabilities. You can then pass the ChromeOptions object into the ChromeDriver constructor"

Set Log Levels in Ruby Properties

For logs, we can choose from six different levels of logging:

• "OFF"
• "SEVERE"
• "WARNING"
• "INFO"
• "CONFIG"
• "FINE"
• "FINER"
• "FINEST"
• "ALL"

In Ruby.Properties, I added the properties and values:

env/default/ruby.properties:
CHROME_LOGGING = WARNING
CHROMEDRIVER_LOGGING = SEVERE

... If there is event the slightest thing wrong displaying in the Chrome browser while my app is running, I want to know, Warnings and all!

... If there is anything with WebDriver, I only want to know the problems tagged with Severe.

Add Capabilities

Creating Capabilities and adding them to the browser in Ruby is easy (once you know how).

Instead of hardcoding the logging preferences for the browser or the webdriver, I will use what I have declared in my Ruby properties. 

spec_helper.rb

 CAPABILITIES = Selenium::WebDriver::Remote::Capabilities.chrome(  
  loggingPrefs: {  
   browser: ENV['CHROME_LOGGING'], # Capture JavaScript errors  
   driver: ENV['CHROMEDRIVER_LOGGING'] # Capture WebDriver errors  
  }  
 )  
   
 before_suite do  
  Capybara.register_driver(:chrome) do |app|  
   ...  
   ...  
   
  Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app, browser: :chrome,  
                    desired_capabilities: CAPABILITIES,  
                    options: options)  
  end  

... What is before_suite? Gauge has before_suite and after_suite as an execution hook: https://docs.gauge.org/language.html#execution-hooks

These commands will set up the logging level for every instance of Chrome that you spin up, headless or otherwise.

If there are any JavaScript errors displaying in Chrome, or any problems in ChromeDriver, you can take a look at the logs to diagnose what is wrong.

But what do you do with the information afterwards?

Save The Logs!

After the test suite has run, we can take the browser and driver logs, put that in variables called browser_errors and driver_errors, then create and open two files, chrome.log and chromedriver.log, saving the data to the logs directory.

Here is what I hacked together:

 after_suite do  
  browser_errors = page.driver.browser.manage.logs.get(:browser)  
  driver_errors = page.driver.browser.manage.logs.get(:driver)  
   
  open('logs/chrome.log', 'w') do |f|  
   f << browser_errors  
  end  
   
  open('logs/chromedriver.log', 'w') do |f|  
   f << driver_errors  
  end  
 end  

Run Tests, Examine Logs

Let's run our test suite again, and see what we find:

• bundle exec gauge run specs -v

logs/chromedriver.log:

• It's blank. Hooray!
• Take a look at the chromedriver.log produced on my GitHub site. 

logs/chrome.log:

• View chrome.log on my GitHub site

[#<Selenium::WebDriver::LogEntry:0x00007f8b121610a8 @level="SEVERE", @timestamp=1545326365292, @message="https://the-internet.herokuapp.com/favicon.ico - Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found)">]

... Hrm... It looks like the Favorite icon, the icon that shows up when you Favorite or Bookmark a page, is missing. Someone should tell Dave Haeffner, the person who created The-Internet. 

Last, but not least, we will be adding to our project the code review tool, Rubocop.

Happy Testing!

Basic Capybara-Gauge:

• Part One: Analyzing The-Internet
• Part Two: Setup Ruby Environment
• Part Three: Setup Capybara to Test Opening Chrome
• Part Four: Add Option For Chrome Headless
• Part Five: Add Test Steps and Spec Implementations
• Part Six: Setup Chrome and ChromeDriver Logging
• Part Seven: Rubocop Code Review
• Source Code: https://github.com/tjmaher/capybara-gauge

-T.J. Maher
Sr. QA Engineer, Software Engineer in Test
Meetup Organizer, Ministry of Testing - Boston

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