selenium as a service in osx

on testing, selenium, jenkins, and osx

Setting up selenium server as a service in os x that starts on boot. What is needed is a plist service file to start and take stdout and stderr and log the output. I will be using homebrew for install of the selenium server. in this example i have used a vagrant image of Yosemite you can find it here vagrant image.

A NOTE about the OS X Licensing. Apple’s EULA states that you can install your copy on your actual Apple-hardware, plus up to two VMs running on your Apple-hardware. So using this box on another hardware is may be illigal and you should do it on your own risk.

Start by installing the selenium standalone server using brew

$ brew install selenium-server-standalone

install java7 using brew cask

$ brew tap caskroom/versions
$ brew cask install java7

create a plist file for the service. This is what is needed if you like to start selenium-standalone with port 4444 and logging the stdout to /var/log/selenium/selenium-output.log and stderr to /var/log/selenium/selenium-error.log . save it as selenium.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>selenium</string>
        <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true/>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/usr/local/bin/selenium-server</string>
                <string>-port</string>
                <string>4444</string>
        </array>
        <key>ServiceDescription</key>
        <string>Selenium Server</string>
        <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
        <string>/var/log/selenium/selenium-error.log</string>
        <key>StandardOutPath</key>
        <string>/var/log/selenium/selenium-output.log</string>
</dict>
</plist>

create the log folder using sudo since root will run the service

$ sudo mkdir -p /var/log/selenium/

copy the selenium.plist to /Library/LaunchDaemons since we like it to run as a demon by the root user on boot.

$ sudo cp selenium.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons

load the service in to system using launchctl

$ sudo launchctl bootstrap system /Library/LaunchDaemons/selenium.plist

bash script to install google chrome

#!/bin/bash
curl -L -O "https://dl.google.com/chrome/mac/stable/GGRO/googlechrome.dmg"
hdiutil mount -nobrowse googlechrome.dmg
cp -R "/Volumes/Google Chrome/Google Chrome.app" /Applications
hdiutil unmount "/Volumes/Google Chrome"
rm googlechrome.dmg

install chromedriver

$ brew install chromedriver

To make it possible to start running selenium tests on the server you need the user logged with a active workspace. To get this working after reboot with no manual login you do the following. Open System Preferences > Security & Privacy >Click the lock to make changes > uncheck Disable automatic login .

Source selenium.plist chrome-install.sh