As I discussed in ‘Driver factory part 3 – Remotewebdrivers and my very own grid’ I found that it was pretty painless to set up a grid hub and node on a single Windows machine. Whilst the grid was itself perfectly stable, it is a bit of a pain to start up multiple command prompts and run individual nodes etc.

There were two obvious improvements to this that I could try:

• Work out how to configure multiple browsers on a single node.
• Use Powershell to launch hub and node from a single point.

Multiple browsers on a single hub.

It is pretty obvious that this works as it is the default configuration if you do not specify any configuration. Previously I had configured each browser on its own node requiring its own command to start it, and command window to control and log the results. I was sure I could do better.

How hard could it be?

Well as expected, it is pretty simple. In this case I am going to describe how I did it on Windows using powershell, but it would be just as simple on MacOs or linux. As a reminder, you just need the the webdriver binaries for your browsers and platform as well as the selenium standalone server jar. For convenience I put them all in ‘C:/Grid’ and I added this directory to the windows System path.

• Starting with a nodeconfig.json.

{
  "capabilities":
  [
    {
      "browserName": "operablink",
      "maxInstances": 5,
      "seleniumProtocol": "WebDriver",
      "webdriver.opera.driver": "C:/Grid/operadriver.exe"
    },
    {
      "browserName": "firefox",
      "maxInstances": 5,
      "seleniumProtocol": "WebDriver",
      "webdriver.gecko.driver": "C:/Grid/geckodriver.exe"
    },
    {
      "browserName": "chrome",
      "maxInstances": 5,
      "seleniumProtocol": "WebDriver",
      "webdriver.chrome.driver": "C:/Grid/chromedriver.exe"
    },
    {
      "browserName": "internet explorer",
      "maxInstances": 5,
      "seleniumProtocol": "WebDriver",
      "webdriver.ie.driver": "C:/Grid/IEDriverServer.exe"
    },	
    {
      "browserName": "MicrosoftEdge",
      "maxInstances": 5,
      "seleniumProtocol": "WebDriver",
      "webdriver.edge.driver": "C:/Grid/MicrosoftWebDriver.exe"
    }
  ],
  "proxy": "org.openqa.grid.selenium.proxy.DefaultRemoteProxy",
  "maxSession": 5,
  "port": 5555,
  "register": true,
  "registerCycle": 5000,
  "hub": "http://localhost:4444",
  "nodeStatusCheckTimeout": 5000,
  "nodePolling": 5000,
  "role": "node",
  "unregisterIfStillDownAfter": 60000,
  "downPollingLimit": 2,
  "debug": false,
  "servlets" : [],
  "withoutServlets": [],
  "custom": {}
}

The node launch command then becomes:

java -jar "C:\Grid\selenium-server-standalone-3.8.1.jar" -port 5560 -role node -hub http://localhost:4444/grid/register -nodeConfig "C:\Grid\nodeconfig.json"

Launch from one command

• To launch both hub and node from a single place, we can just call the commands from a 2 line powershell script

Start-Process powershell {java -jar "C:\Grid\selenium-server-standalone-3.8.1.jar" -role hub}
Start-Process powershell {java -jar "C:\Grid\selenium-server-standalone-3.8.1.jar" -port 5560 -role node -hub http://localhost:4444/grid/register -nodeConfig "C:\Grid\nodeconfig.json"}

That’s all there is to it. Run the powershell script and both hub and node will launch.

Progress made this week:

• Streamlined the grid launch process into a single powershell script.

Lessons learnt:

• Launching the grid could hardly be easier.
• Opera still won’t launch on the grid despite much research and many attempts.