Possible to register Selenium RC's with the Hudson Selenium Grid Hub w/o the RC's being slaves in the Hudson cluster?

Question

I am trying to get Hudson to run my ruby based selenium tests. I have installed the Selenium Grid plugin, but I don't want to have the RC's running as slaves in a Hudson cluster. The reason for this is I don't want to waste the next six years of my life trying to configure each of my projects in various Windows environments.

Hudson currently pulls each project from Github and builds it just fine. With a regular Selenium Grid setup, I am able to edit the grid_configuration.yml file to represent the various environments I wish to tests against, then pass environment variables to the rake task that runs the test i.e. which browser/platfom to run on and the URL of the application under test -- usually a port on the hub machine running in a specific environment.

In this way, the machines on which the RC's run don't need to know anything about the source code of my apps, they just need to have selenium-grid installed and have registered with the hub.

Is there a way of elegantly emulating this with Hudson?

Answer 1

do you have a concept of build agents, I do not know much about Hudson. We are using Anthill Pro at work and we have set up an Ahtill Pro agent. The source code is downloaded to the agent and the agent is responsible to run the maven goal for running the tests. It works pretty well for us as the RC machines are not part of the build environment. the tests are responsible to talk to Selenium HUB and get new sessions and do the testing.

I hope this helps.

Cheers Haroon

Answer 2

I chose to not use the plugin in order to take advantage of the newer Grid version. I cloned a few VMs with a startup script that runs ant launch-remote-control from a shared drive that they can all access. Hudson doesn't have, and doesn't need any access to the Grid nodes and they aren't slaves to Hudson. I altered my Hudson server to launch the hub on machine startup. This setup allows me to run the grid normally with or without Hudson.