Running Selenium in Python Driven Mode

Update August 2007

For people who are stumbling on this blog post via searches: this post is outdated. There is no Python Driven Mode' in Selenium anymore. Instead, you should use Selenium RC, which offers the same capabilities and much more.

Original post:

I blogged about this before, but here it is again, in a shorter and hopefully easier to understand format. This post was prompted by questions on the selenium-users at openqa.org mailing list on how to run Selenium in Driven Mode using Python. By Driven Mode, people generally understand scripting Selenium commands as opposed to writing them in HTML tables. Scripting offers obvious advantages, such as real programming language constructs and idioms.

Here is a step-by-step HOWTO on running Selenium in Driven Mode using Python. I just tried on a Windows XP computer (see this blog post of mine for details on running it on *nix):

1. Download and install Twisted version 1.3 (this is important, because things have been known not to work so well with Twisted 2.x). Old versions of Twisted, including 1.3, can be downloaded from here. I used Twisted 1.3 for Python 2.4.

2. Check out the Selenium source code:

svn co http://svn.openqa.org/svn/selenium/trunk selenium

3. Let's assume you checked out the code in C:\proj\selenium. You need to copy the contents of C:\proj\selenium\code\javascript (the contents, not that directory itself) into the C:\proj\selenium\code\python\twisted\src\selenium\selenium_driver directory.

4. Open a DOS command prompt and cd into C:\proj\selenium\code\python\twisted\src\selenium, then run:

python selenium_server.py

You should see something like this printed at the console (if you don't have PyCrypto already installed):

C:\proj\selenium\code\python\twisted\src\selenium>python selenium_server.py
C:\Python24\lib\site-packages\twisted\protocols\dns.py:61: RuntimeWarning: PyCrypto not available - proceeding with non-cryptographically secure random source 1
Starting up Selenium Server...

To verify that the Twisted-based Selenium server is up and running, open this URL in a browser: http://localhost:8080/selenium-driver/SeleneseRunner.html

You should see the Selenium Functional Test Runner page at this point.

5. Open another DOS command prompt and cd into C:\proj\selenium\code\python\twisted\src\selenium, then run:

python google-test-xmlrpc.py

At this point, a browser window will be automatically opened, the browser will connect to the SeleneseRunner.html page and will execute the test commands specified in the google-test-xmlrpc.py script. You should see the bottom frame of the SeleneseRunner.html page open the Google home page, then enter a search phrase and run the search. Here is what it looks like in my case (click on the image to see a larger image):



Also, the google-test-xmlrpc script printed this on the console:

OK
PASSED
OK
PASSED
OK
PASSED
Actual value 'Selenium ThoughtWorks - Google Search' did not match 'Google Search: Selenium ThoughtWorks'
test complete

So you can see that the one of the test commands -- app.verifyTitle('Google Search: Selenium ThoughtWorks') -- actually fails, because Google changed the way they construct the title for search result pages.

Note that you can drive Selenium from any language that offers XML-RPC client libraries. If you look in the twisted\src\examples directory, you'll notice that besides the Python client script, a Ruby script and a Perl script are also included. You can just as easily write Java code to do the same thing.

That's about it. Let me know if you have problems following these steps. Leave a comment on this blog or write to the selenium-users at openqa.org mailing list.