So in and effort to write a bit more, here is a semi-quick lesson on getting selenium tests and testsuites to run via jenkins jobs. On a related topic which somehow is completely different, I present a very quick howto on setting up the selenium grid (Selenium Plugin + manually updated jar) hub and first node in the grid on jenkins as well. When I was setting these up to work together, I failed to grasp that these two pairings of Selenium and Jenkins were different beasts. Which is my own fault for not reading more before jumping in.

Common setup and requirements

I am using Jenkins on a headless ubuntu ec2 instance. I went the route of installing jenkins via apt-get. I had issues trying to get jenkins to cleanly install and work under tomcat with a frontend of nginx, but I know it can work I was just getting it working fast. So with headless linux, to get browsers to work you need an xserver of some sort. I went with Xvfb . I am sure there were other steps needed, but I am running out of steam on this post so will move on to the meat.

Selenium IDE testSuites & Jenkins

In Jenkins, install the SeleniumHQ plugin, this will download a standalone selenium server which you can then add to jenkins jobs as a “SeleniumHQ htmlSuite Run” build step. A quick example would be to use the Selenium IDE firefox plugin to create a simple test, and testsuite. Export those test and testsuite as html files, and then publish the html files into your SCM of choice. Create a new jenkins job, point the job’s SCM at the location of where you stored the testsuites, and then add a build step which runs the testsuite, point the suiteFile and resultFile to the jenkins job workspace. Run the jenkins job. You should then have a resultfile which you can view via the jenkins job workspace. (I know I should add more here, maybe in a later release)

Selenium Grid

If you want to develope more involved scripts and only run them via an exposed Seleniumn Grid, then in Jenkins install the Selenium Plugin, which is different then the previous HQ plugin. This will start up an always on Selenium Grid hub, which will wait for nodes to attach to. At first I ran into problems because of the dual install of the HQ plugin, to solve this I changed the port the grid starts up on (4040), to a different port. I then failed to RTFM and had trouble when pointing scripts to the hub. What I needed to do first was attach worker nodes to the hub, and then my remote scripts worked. To get an always on worker node, I just started up an always on worker node running on the same jenkins box. Take note NODEPORT and HUBPORT need to be suited for your jenkins env.

 java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.30.0.jar -port NODEPORT -role node -hub http://localhost:HUBPORT/wd/hub

After that I had a working grid, to which I could run my remote scripts against.