First of all I’m going to note that Selenium comes with an utter lack of documentation and what documentation does exist is utterly disorganized. This has proven to be the biggest stumbling block to actually getting started with Selenium.

It seems promising enough: It’s a java based testing tool that you install in your *nix setup alongside apache (definitely root access material here) and then there’s a firefox extension (what originally caught my attention in the first place) to help construct test cases through browser usage.

And certainly the few bits of documentation were all aglow! “Just unpack here, and VROOOM!!!” I mean, come on:

Selenium is a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browser, just as real users do. And they run in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. No other test tool covers such a wide array of platforms.

So, cross browser and multiplatform. I like this. Plus,

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.

I mean, I’m just rubbing my hands, here.

But what’s this? Trouble in paradise? If you look through all the selenium documentation, there is nothing that discusses how to install it. Finally, after quite a bit of hunting around, you can find this (note that it is NOT on any of the “official” pages but a separate blog ) –

For people new to Selenium, here’s a 30-second (32.78 seconds to be precise) tutorial on how to install Selenium on a Linux box running Apache. I’ll assume the DocumentRoot of the Apache installation is /var/www/html.

1. Download Selenium from openqa.org. The latest release of Selenium as of this writing is 0.6.
2. Unzip selenium-0.6.zip and cd into the selenium-0.6 directory.
3. Move or copy the selenium sub-directory somewhere under the DocumentRoot of your Apache server.

That’s it — you have a working Selenium installation!

Whoa nelly. Not quite. First, you do have to do some basic mods to httpd.conf for Apache. I added these items:

<Directory "/Web/selenium/">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews ExecCGI
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl .js
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from <i>myhost.com</i>
&lt;/Directory&gt;
Alias /selenium/ &quot;/Web/selenium/&quot;
 


Then after unpacking the zip archive into the selenium directory, I go over to the new website and get…nothing. The test cases don’t respond to anything. This is on a sun solaris; I’m reasonably sure that Java and JavaScript are running okay. And in fact, I can run their TestRunner demo which is hiding somewhere over the selenium site; I forgot to mark it and haven’t quite got the energy to hunt it down here at home. But I ruled out something not being set up on our end, otherwise it would not have run at either location (mine and theirs).

And then I discovered this little gem that recommended modifying selenium-api.js in the directory. Oh. Dear.

Well, I took a deep breath and made the modifications, commenting all over the place so I’d be able to figure out what I’d done later. Bupkus.

So there it remains at the moment until I get a chance to get back to it. Hasn’t been too much extra time at work lately, though.