How to *automate* browser based unit tests, locally or on Jenkins - unit-testing

Question

Straight up been looking for answers to this question for months, still no idea how to actually do it - how does one automate tests that run in the browser? Selenium tests run on the backend and of course can be automated, and we are doing this now. Recently I have been tasked with automating browser based unit tests and I have a significant knowledge gap -
I don't know how to actually do it -
For example - how do does an automated test runner collect test results and exit codes of (unit) tests that run in the browser? Can anyone explain how this actually done and the steps to accomplish this?
Is Karma the best tool to accomplish this?

Answer 1

You can use http://phantomjs.org/. phantomjs is a headless webbrowser, which you can see as fullstack webbrowser without gui, usable as library. Together with karma you can execute your unit tests without relying on any GUI implementations.
Here a blogpost, which explains the different components in such a secenario http://orizens.com/wp/topics/my-setup-for-testing-js-with-jasmine-karma-phantomjs-angularjs/
Means you can execute your karma unit tests on a headless linux server.
Clarification:
The need for phantomjs doesn't come from unit tests. The need for phantomjs comes from the fact that your js unit tests depend onto the browser api.
Its a good design principle to structure the code, that the coupling to the browser api is not cluttered over all the code. Try to introduce a thin layer which encapsulates the browser api dependencies. Like this you can test your js mostly without the need for phantomjs.
To execute your unit tests with phantomjs can take its time. If you have a lot of unit tests, its better to factor out the dependencies to the browser api. So you can execute more tests without the need for phantomjs and only a minority of the unit tests need to be executed with phantomjs.

Answer 2

You can probably use cucumber. If you have 20 test cases, that you can need to execute.
You can create a feature file which will contain all the scenarios.
The Runner classes and Method on what needs to be done can be defined in a different package. Let's say you have a scenario to
1. Open browser.
2. Enter google link.
3. Login using credentials.
Create a feature file with the above information.
Use a Cucumber runner class. And create package methods such as
#When("^Open Browser$")
public void open_Browser() throws Throwable {
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.get("www.google.com");
}
similarly you can create different methods to run. To run the jar, you can use Command Line Interface technique.

Answer 3

Great piece of article LINK
Basics:
This is for Python automation, you'll need to have some previous knowledge/experience.
pip install selenium
pip install nose
Above should be executed in cmd or shell...
For this test we will open the AWeber website at http://www.aweber.com
using Firefox, and make sure that the title of the page is "AWeber Email Marketing Services & Software Solutions for Small Business".
import unittest
from selenium import webdriver
class AweberTest(unittest.TestCase):
#classmethod
def setUpClass(cls):
cls.driver = webdriver.Firefox()
def test_title(self):
self.driver.get('https://www.aweber.com')
self.assertEqual(
self.driver.title,
'AWeber Email Marketing Services & Software Solutions for Small Business')
#classmethod
def tearDownClass(cls):
cls.driver.quit()
Running the test using nose:
nose aweber.py
Next test, clicking on elements:
self.driver.get('https://www.aweber.com')
order_tab = self.driver.find_element_by_css_selector('#ordertab>a')
order_tab.click()
There are many selectors in that we can use find_element_by_(css/xpath/name/id) - Locating elements
And in this case we used the method click but we can also .send_keys("asdf") ,scroll, execute java script using
browser.execute_script("alert('I canNNNNN not do javascript')")
Full code example: LINK-Pastebin