Persistent Selenium

Now you can keep that precious browser window open when doing continuous integration testing. Save seconds, and sanity, with every test re-run!

Also, the browser stays open at its last state so you can inspect it and more easily fix your tests and/or code.

Start an instance:

persistent_selenium [ --port 9854 ] [ --browser firefox ] [ --chrome-extensions <file.crx> ... ]

Tell Capybara to use it:

# features/support/env.rb

require 'persistent_selenium/driver'
Capybara.default_driver = :persistent_selenium

If you're using Cucumber, you can also install that hook:

persistent_selenium install

Should work just the same as if you used the standard Capybara Selenium driver, except for these two differences:

• The browser starts up first thing and sticks around, so you don't pay the startup/shutdown penalty with each test run.
• The last page you were on before your tests passed/failed stays there, so you can inspect it and adjust your tests.

The browser's cache is disabled, and cookies are reset before the next test runs, so you still get the state cleared out before your next set of tests.

.persistent_selenium

Configure everything in your app with a .persistent_selenium file:

# .persistent_selenium
PersistentSelenium.configure do |c|
  c.browser = :chrome
  c.chrome_extensions = %w{AngularJS-Batarang.crx}
end

Chrome Extensions

If, for example, you do a lot with AngularJS and want to use Batarang, download the extension, put it in your project's folder somewhere, and call persistent_selenium with the path to the extension:

persistent_selenium --browser chrome --chrome-extensions AngularJS-Batarang.crx

Best practice

Use it with Foreman and Guard. Start up your test suite via Guard, configure your test suite to use persistent_selenium, and run persistent_selenium alongside it:

guard: guard -g wip
ps: persistent_selenium

It's an integral part of my integration testing setup.

Under the hood

It's DRb, which mostly Just Works (tm), and has a little reshuffling of the default Capybara Selenium driver's code.

When DRb doesn't Just Work (tm)

You're most likely using all and invoking an action on one of the nodes within, I'd wager. If you need to find a node to perform an action on, it's best to stick with find, since it's less likely that node will go out of ObjectSpace that quickly. If you need to examine the document for particular properties, and all seems like the best way to do it, instead try parsing the document body with Nokogiri and using its finders. That way, all your node searching will be done on the client end.