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just-ask

As the name suggests, this library is eventually going to end up becoming a simple prototype that can be enhanced to represent an "On-demand Grid" (which explains the reason behind the name just-ask ).

Why an On-Demand Grid ?

A static Grid (i.e., a hub and a fixed number of nodes) is a good start for setting up a remote execution infrastructure. But once the usage of the hub starts going up, problems start creeping up. Nodes go stale and start causing false failures for the tests and require constant maintenance (restart).

Some of it can be solved by embedding a "self healing" mechanism into the hub, but when it comes to scaling the Grid infrastructure this also does not help a lot.

just-ask is an on-demand grid, wherein there are no fixed nodes attached to the grid. As and when tests make hit the hub, a node is spun off, the test is routed to the node and after usage the node is cleaned up. The on-demand node can be a docker container that hosts a selenium node.

Pre-requisites

just-ask requires :

• JDK 8.
• A Selenium Grid of version 3.14.0 or higher.
• If you would like to leverage docker based on demand solution
  • Access to default Docker unix socket
    • you can refer here
  • Or Docker Remote API enabled
    • For windows you can refer here,
    • For UNIX refer here and
    • For OSX refer here

How to use

In order to consume just-ask for your straight forward on-demand grid needs, following instructions need to be followed:

• First download the uber jar from here. Make sure you download the uber jar i.e., the jar name that ends with jar-with-dependencies. The latest released v
• Download the latest Selenium standalone jar from here.
• Now create a configuration JSON file as shown below :

{
  "dockerRestApiUri": "http://192.168.43.130:2375",
  "localhost": "0.0.0.0",
  "dockerImagePort": "4444",
  "volume": "/dev/shm:/dev/shm",
  "maxSession": 5,
  "mapping": [
    {
      "browser": "chrome",
      "target": "selenium/standalone-chrome:3.14.0",
      "implementation": "com.rationaleemotions.server.DockerBasedSeleniumServer"
    },
    {
      "browser": "firefox",
      "target": "selenium/standalone-firefox:3.14.0",
      "implementation": "com.rationaleemotions.server.JvmBasedSeleniumServer"
    }
  ],
  "environment": {
     "SCREEN_WIDTH": 1280,
     "SCREEN_HEIGHT": 720
  }
}

• Start the On-demand Grid using the below command (Here the JVM argument -Dconfig.file is used to specify the location of the JSON configuration file that we created above.)

java -Dconfig.file=config.json -cp selenium-server-standalone-3.14.0.jar:just-ask-<VERSION>-jar-with-dependencies.jar \
org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncherV3 -role hub -servlets com.rationaleemotions.servlets.EnrollServlet

• Now wire in the Ghost Proxy into this on-demand hub by loading the URL : http://localhost:4444/grid/admin/EnrollServlet

• That's about it. The On-demand Grid is now ready for use.

• To run tests against the On-demand Grid you just instantiate a RemoteWebDriver instance and then work with it.

  Here's a sample that shows using chrome browser:

URL url = new URL("http://localhost:4444/wd/hub");
RemoteWebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(url, DesiredCapabilities.chrome());

Understanding the JSON configuration file.

The meaning of each of the attributes of the JSON file is as below :

• dockerRestApiUri - Represents the Docker Rest API URI (could be unix:///var/run/docker.sock or http://192.168.43.130:2375).
• localhost - Represents the hostname of the machine on which the Docker Daemon is running on (Its safe to leave its value as 0.0.0.0 )
• dockerImagePort - Represents the port number that is exposed inside the docker container.
• volume - Represents a volume to be mounted. Can be left empty.
• maxSession - Represents the maximum number of concurrent sessions that can be supported by the On-demand Hub after which new test session requests will be queued.
• mapping - Represents a set of key-value pairs wherein browser represents the browser flavor and target represents the name of the docker image that is capable of supporting the respective browser. The target may not be relevant to all implementation values (for e.g., the target is currently relevant ONLY for docker based on-demand nodes.)
• environment - Represents environmental variable key-value pairs to be passed to docker container

Understanding the relevance of implementation

just-ask currently supports two implementation flavors :

• com.rationaleemotions.server.DockerBasedSeleniumServer - Indicates that for the browser in question, you would like to leverage the Docker way of spinning off nodes on demand.
• com.rationaleemotions.server.JvmBasedSeleniumServer - Indicates that for the browser in question, you would like to leverage the JVM way of spinning off nodes on demand (i.e., the on-demand node would be a new JVM process.)

How to customize and use.

In-case you would like to wire in your own Custom Server implementation, following is how it can be done :

just-ask is a Maven artifact. In order to consume it, you merely need to add the following as a dependency in your pom file.

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.rationaleemotions</groupId>
    <artifactId>just-ask</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.5</version>
</dependency>

Now that you have added the above as a maven dependency, you build your own implementation of the Server, by implementing the interface com.rationaleemotions.server.ISeleniumServer.

After that, you can wire in your implementation via the implementation attribute in the JSON configuration file using the JVM argument -Dconfig.file.

Building the code on your own

In order to get started with using this library here are the set of instructions that can be followed :

• Build the code using mvn clean package
• Drop the built jar (you will find two jars, so please make sure you pick up the uber jar which would have its name around something like this just-ask-<VERSION>-jar-with-dependencies.jar ) in the directory that contains the selenium server standalone.
• Start the selenium hub using the command java -cp selenium-server-standalone-3.14.0.jar:just-ask-<VERSION>-jar-with-dependencies.jar org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncherV3 -role hub -servlets com.rationaleemotions.servlets.EnrollServlet
• Explicitly register the ghost node by loading the URL http://localhost:4444/grid/admin/EnrollServlet in a browser.

Now the On-demand Grid is ready for use.