Selenium/Ruby/Running tests

You may not need to run browser tests at all. If our Continuous Integration reports that an automated test is failing, you can view its code, manually go through its steps in your browser, and if it fails for you, file a bug against the MediaWiki component that has the problem.

However, if you're writing a test or investigating a test, it helps if you can run the browser tests yourself. You don't necessarily need your own local MediaWiki instance, as the tests can load web pages on some MediaWiki host such as test2.wikipedia.org or en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org.

You do need:
 * a browser that supports the test framework
 * the code of the tests
 * the cucumber test program and all its supporting bits and pieces

Browser support
Recent Firefox and Chrome/Chromium have the WebDriver automated testing support built-in. So too does PhantomJS, the "headless" WebKit browser.

Getting browser test code
For the most part, browser tests reside in the particular MediaWiki extensions being tested, such as VisualEditor and Flow, in a subdirectory named tests/browser. All these projects are on gerrit.wikimedia.org and are mirrored to Github.

A few remnant general tests remain in the browsertests project, but at some point will probably migrate to the mediawiki/core repository.

Use git clone to get the relevant repository, for example

or

Common code used by all the browser tests in all the extension repositories is maintained in a Ruby gem called mediawiki-selenium gem.

The mediawiki_selenium gem contains shared steps code such as


 * login
 * visit RandomPage
 * reset Preferences
 * check for ResourceLoader errors

and manages common aspects of running tests such as


 * starting browsers both local and on Sauce Labs
 * managing browser capabilities
 * running headless tests
 * running browser tests in Jenkins
 * managing browser behavior according to environment variables such as KEEP_BROWSER_OPEN and REUSE_BROWSER

Ruby software for browser testing
You can either or
 * follow the instructions in mediawiki-selenium to configure Ruby and install  and supporting code for your system
 * Quality Assurance/Browser testing/Setup instructions has detailed guidance on installing Ruby, git, etc.
 * install the MediaWiki-Vagrant virtual machine, and in it enable the  role which will install all the necessary code.

The first takes some work, it's not too bad if you are running Linux or Mac OS X.

The second is more than you need if you are going to run tests on a public MediaWiki instance, since it configures an entire local MediaWiki installation. Also note that the Mediawiki Vagrant may lag the actual browsertests implementation in significant ways.

Browser support
A browser must implement the WebDriver interface so that tests can "drive" it. This is built into Firefox (the default browser assumed by our browser tests); for Chrome/chromium you need to install it, e.g. the package chromium-chromedriver.

To run a regular browser without it drawing windows on your screen, you need to install xvfb so it can draw to an invisible "X virtual framebufffer". In Ubuntu or Debian, something like sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends xvfb

You can also run tests in the PhantomJS headless WebKit browser. Recent versions have built-in WebDriver support.

Running the tests
For each test run you must tell Cucumber the wiki to visit, supply some additional information if the tests log in, and name the features to test.


 * Specify the target wiki that the browser will visit with export MEDIAWIKI_URL=URL/to/target/wiki/, e.g. http://127.0.0.1:8080/wiki/ for MediaWiki-Vagrant.
 * Tests that use the MediaWiki web API need a export MEDIAWIKI_API_URL=URL/to/api.php ,e.g. http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/w/api.php for Betalabs.
 * For tests that login:
 * create a user named  on the target wiki
 * specify the  password on the target wiki with export MEDIAWIKI_PASSWORD=Selenium_user_password
 * the Selenium_user passwords on some of our test environments where we run Continuous integration tests are stored in Jenkins configuration.
 * In the browsertests/tests/browser directory, type bundle exec cucumber to run all tests.
 * To ignore tests tagged with  (works in progress), run cucumber with the   flag. E.g. bundle exec cucumber -w
 * To run tests tagged for a particular browser or host computer, run cucumber with the  flag. E.g. bundle exec cucumber --tags @firefox --tags @en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org . Cucumber tags explains these annotations in more detail.
 * the tags for each of our Continuous integration browser test jobs are set in its configuration script, click "XXX"


 * To run a single test, in the browsertests/tests/browser directory enter bundle exec cucumber features/foo.feature:NN, where  is the name of the feature test and NN is any line within the particular scenario you want to test.
 * The browser by default is Firefox. You can change the browser by setting the environment variable, other choices include chrome and phantomjs. PhantomJS is a headless WebKit browser.
 * The browser specified by the  opens windows on your screen (unless it is phantomjs). On Linux with X11 you can run browser tests in a headless mode by setting the environment variable    to  . This makes the browser windows appear on an invisible Xvfb virtual framebuffer.
 * By default, the browser will close itself at the end of every scenario. You can keep the browser windows around by setting the environment variable  to  . (This makes no sense for an invisible run using HEADLESS or phantomjs.)
 * You can get screenshots of failures by setting the environment variable  to  . This will capture the screen after errors and save to a screenshots subdirectory.

You can  these environment variables, or put all these variables on the command line before invoking bundle exec cucumber, thus $ HEADLESS=true \ SCREENSHOT_FAILURES=true \ BROWSER=chrome MEDIAWIKI_URL=http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/ \ MEDIAWIKI_API_URL=http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/w/api.php \ MEDIAWIKI_USER=Selenium_user \ MEDIAWIKI_PASSWORD=SomePassword \ bundle exec cucumber features/search.feature

Running browser tests at SauceLabs
Sauce Labs gives you access to a variety of browsers and platforms for testing. For a full list of browsers and OSes supported by SauceLabs, see their platforms page (the specific Linux variant used by SauceLabs is Ubuntu LTS ). If you don't already have a Sauce Labs account, you can get a free limited account at the Sauce Labs signup page (choose either a Free account or an Open Sauce account).

Before running a browser test via Sauce Labs, you'll need to define five environment variable values: The first three values are selected from the set of possible values defined on the Sauce Labs platforms page. The last two values are your Sauce Labs user credentials.
 * 1) BROWSER
 * 2) VERSION
 * 3) PLATFORM
 * 4) SAUCE_ONDEMAND_USERNAME
 * 5) SAUCE_ONDEMAND_ACCESS_KEY

For example, to run a browser test via Sauce Labs with Windows XP and Firefox version 27, you would define environment variable values as follows.

Linux/Unix/Mac:

Windows: Replace  and   with your Sauce Labs username and key. You can get the key at https://saucelabs.com/account at the bottom-left part of the screen.

Then if (for example) you want to run the Go to Log in page scenario, you can execute the test with the usual Cucumber command syntax:

bundle exec cucumber features/login.feature:18

Running VisualEditor browser tests via Vagrant
Some of the browser tests have been re-located to the specific code repositories for which they are most relevant. An example is browser tests for Visual Editor, which can be found in the VisualEditor GitHub repo. To run these tests in the MediaWiki-Vagrant virtual environment, a couple of extra steps are necessary in order to make the Cucumber script itself findable. Here are specific steps that should do the trick:

(in the directory where you have cloned the vagrant repo):

Enabling the  role not only gives you the VE tests, it configures the Vagrant virtual machine to run a local MediaWiki instance with the VisualEditor extension, so you can manually exercise VisualEditor on your local version. To verify the local MediaWiki instance is running successfully, visit http://127.0.0.1:8080/wiki/Main_Page