Every now and then I need to start a new testing project. To give myself an advantage and to save time I created a dummy project using python, selenium, py.test and the pytest plugins pytest-selenium, pytest-variables and pytest-html. To make sure that everything works I integrated the project with Travis CI.

Tools that I’ve used:

selenium is a browser automation tools that makes the life of web application testers much easier, it’s lets you interact with a web page.

py.test is a test runner that simplifies the way you write and execute tests in python

pytest-selenium is a py.test plugin that creates a selenium fixture which you can later use to interact with web pages, it keeps the code cleaner to focus on the main issue the testing. The selenium fixture that is created by this plugin is function scoped, what this means is that the browser is closed and reopened with a clean slate for every test, no cache, no cookies. Which is a good and a bad thing, depending on your needs.

pytest-variables is a pytest plugin that lets you pass variables at run time from a json file. This is a good way to keep you urls, credentials, sensitive information or settings for a test run without the need to change your code

pytest-html is a very nice report tool. It takes the output from pytest and generates a cool html report that is easy to read and understand. For failed selenium tests it takes a screen shot and adds it to the report. It also displays the URL, HTML Browser Log, Driver Log and of course the traceback that generated the failed test.

So what I’ve done?

Firstly I created a new virtualenv for my project. Where I’ve installed the python packages that I knew I will use: pytest, selenium, pytest-selenium, pytest-variables I also added them to the requirements.txt file, pinned them at their latest current version. You want your packages pinned to a certain version because you don’t know what changes the future versions of this packages will bring that will break your tests.

Then I added a conftest.py because I wanted to add some settings to the selenium webdriver and add a virtualdisplay(doesn’t support OSX) in order to make the tests more stable when you run them in CI.

After this I created a new python package that will be the home of our project, with the name of the project. Base on the Page Object model In this package I created another two python packages named pages - where will keep the future interactions with the web pages that we will be testing and tests the place where we are going to put our tests.

Then I created a new basepage.py module in the pages package. A base module that will be inherited by almost all the future modules that will be in this package. This module contains the basic page interactions that we will need in the future. Before each interaction we want to make sure that our element is visible and enabled. Actions that are covered here: click, enter text, select from a dropdown In our constructor we are setting the webdriver instance, saving out variables(settings), checking if we want to load the URL and confirming that we are on the correct page.

from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.support.select import Select
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait


class BasePage:
    def __init__(self, selenium, variables, open_url=False):
        self.selenium = selenium
        self.variables = variables
        if open_url:
            self.selenium.get(self.variables['url'])
        self.confirm_page_load()

    def confirm_page_load(self):
        pass

    def click(self, selector):
        element = WebDriverWait(self.selenium, self._IMPLICIT_WAIT).until(
            EC.element_to_be_clickable(
                selector
            )
        )
        element.click()

    def enter_text(self, selector, text):
        element = self.is_visible(selector)
        element.click()
        element.clear()
        element.send_keys(text)

    def select_text_from_dropdown(self, selector, value):
        dropdown = WebDriverWait(
                self.selenium, self._IMPLICIT_WAIT
        ).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located(selector))
        Select(dropdown).select_by_value(value)

To be continued…

See complete project on Github: here.

  • Also Guru99 has a nice Selenium IDE tutorial over on their site.