Writing your first test using Casperjs

Casperjs is a wonderful open source navigation, scripting and testing utility written in JS which uses PhantomJS webkit , which is a headless browser. It simplifies the process of defining a full navigation scenario and provides some high level methods for doing tasks such as – entering text, clicking, logging, navigation and logging events.

I had to spend some days to get my first test case running, so here I am making my notes which will benefit me in the longer run. ( In case you have more info, please leave a comment)

1. Download and set your environment paths for casperjs and phantomjs ( refer – previous post)

2. Create a folder say C:\JSplayground ( in my case) which will house your casperjs cases.

3. You can either use VS to write your new casperjs script or even a simple tool notepad++ will suffice.

4. Below is the code, I used, which you can also use to get your first case running. It’s pretty straight forward thing. You can copy the code and create a file with extension .js . In my case – sampletest.js

 

5. From the above code, If you have not figured out already, setting the capturePage as true or false drops the screen shot of the application under test in the same folder as your .js file. Ensure that the casper.userAgent is set to the same , as I was searching for long since some websites render and open differently for different browsers.

6. Once you have created your .js file, you can run now this script from your location by using the below command

 

7. I have given the option of using –ignore-ssl-errors=yes –ssl-protocol=any  so that even if your url is https:// your tests will run. BTB, Phantomjs had really bad support for SSL until 2.0 release. ( unfortunately I am on a newer version of Phantomjs and Casperjs is not equipped to handle 2.0. However, thanks to rdpanek , he has released a fix for CasperJS bootstrap/ Phantomjs 2.0 fix)

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Phantomjs & Casperjs – Installation Simplified

To run Phantomjs & Casperjs on your system, here is the installation steps you need to follow. Though these are pretty simple ones, but the lack of proper documentation can actually send you on a leather hunt just to get your first case running. So here it is simplified.

1. Download Phantomjs from here.

2. Unzip the entire package to say c:\phantomjs . Ensure that the phantomjs.exe is copied from the subfolder bin to man folder. So your final folder should look somewhat like that.

3. Now head start –> right click my computer, choose properties –> Advanced system properties – > select advanced tab and click on Environment Variables.  Append ;C:\phantomjs to your PATH environment variable. Feel free to modify your installation and update the PATH settings to reflect the same

4. Now download Casperjs from their home page

5. Extract the contents to c:\casperjs

6. Ensure you add this PATH into your environment as shown above.

7. Restart system and try these two commands to make sure the PATHs are properly set.

phantomjs

You are now all set!

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Adding code snippets to blogger using windows live writer

Finally the day has come where I am able to use Windows live writer ( by far the best free blogging client) along with code snippets. After some research , I found a simple work around as most of the content available was for the wordpress platform.

Head over to https://gist.github.com and create a free account. Once you do that, create a new public Gist as in the snapshot below

Copy the Embed URL into the source view of the Windows live writer.

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VB script code to keep the system alive and prevent locking

Use the following code: (Save it as .vbs and execute, it will run for ever). Kill the wscript from the task manager when u want to stop.


----
You can replace the NUMLOCK with either CAPSLOCK if it creates issues with your UI testing

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Create Multiple app.config files and run them with pre build events & msbuild

 

Today we were stumped with having different config files for automation for different environments like QA, Daily runs, BDT etc . While there are various ways, we could have resolved this, each of the methods we thought had one or the other challenge as we needed a single simple solution so that we could service 20 products line.

Also, making changes to the code base did not make sense. So here is how we achieved it

1.  Go to the solution – > right click choose configuration manager. In that screen use the drop down for active solution configuration and choose new. You will be prompted with the new solution configuration as shown below. We added DailyRun as our name.

2. Now go ahead and create any number of configuration files you want. Here in our case, we have BDT, DailyRun and Release1 as the configurations for different environment.

(side note : in our solution we had set the original app.config as a content and property always copy. The other configs were left out as it is. As app.config is the main file and that is the one which does all the hard work)

3.  Let's create a batch file called "copyalways.bat" and here's the contents:

Put this copyalways.bat file in the root of your project. Basically this batch file will copy a file over another if the files don't match.

4. Create a Pre-build Event. Right-click on your Project and select Properties. Click Build Events and in the "Pre-build event command line" and enter this value:


5. Now if you build, you'll see in the Build Output the batch file being run and the files being copied. Because it's a Pre-Build Event it'll be seen in both the Build Output in Visual Studio .NET.
 
And there you go. The connection string in the web.config now contains deployment-specific configuration data.
You can add only the parameter part to your build definition now. This will help you run the same solution with different config files.

(Note: we noticed that once the newer app.config is copied , the file was becoming read-only and was not taking in the next build config. The way to solve it would be to make it non read only within the code itself. I will post that code soon).
Done. Here is the complete code of the bat file

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Dashboard using ElasticSearch, Logstash & Kibana - 1

All set ? I will try my best to list down the exact steps followed by me to get the ELK stack working on windows. I have tried to get in as much details as possible , special thanks to my co-worker – Kiran, for helping me with this research

This guide was installed successfully on  - Windows 7 Enterprise

Let’s get started

1. Dowload ElasticSearch , Logstash and Kibana from here

2. Create folders in your local drive say c:\Elastic and extract all the folders. So, after it is done, here is how it looks

c:\Elastic\elasticsearch

c:\Elastic\logstash

c:\Elastic\Kibana

Optionally, you can create a new folder say – elasticlogs , which will house the log files, incase you want to dump it there

c:\Elastic\elasticlogs

In the Elasticsearch\bin folder , edit the elasticsearch.yml to include  -

http.cors.enabled: true

Create a logstash config file with

                input {
                file {
                  type => "XMLLogs"
                  path => ["C:/ElasticLogs/*.*","//networkpath/*.*"]
                }
                }
                output {
                 stdout {codec => rubydebug }
                elasticsearch {
                   host => "localhost"
                    protocol => "http"
                    }
                }

3. Download  and install the latest version of Java JDK and install it depending on your OS architecture

4. Set your Java path , to do this

Right click on the My Computer icon on your desktop and select properties

Click the Advanced Tab

Click the Environment Variables button

Under System Variable, click New

Enter the variable name as JAVA_HOME

Enter the variable value as the install path "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_06" (update your java version accordingly

Click Ok

Click apply changes

5. Install IIS

1. First, go to Control Panel, and then click on Programs. You’ll see a link for “Turn Windows features on or off”
2. 
3. If you expand the Internet Information Services tree node, you can see that there are a lot of options beneath it. You will probably want to explore these options, because even if you click on IIS, some of the necessary options for doing development aren’t checked.
4. 
5. Once you’ve gone ahead and checked the items you want, and clicked OK, you’ll see this dialog for a while….
6. 
7. Now when you navigate in your browser to localhost, you’ll see the new default page…
8. 

6. Open IIS Manager, by going to command prompt and using “inetmgr”  IIS manager will open, now stop the "Default Web Site"

7. Create a new website for Kibana as shown below
Right click on "sites" in the left part of IIS Manager and click "Add Website" . In the end it should look something like this

You can add mime types as below if your IIS version is older

".": application/octet-stream
".json": text/html

8. Start elasticsearch by hitting this in command prompt C:\Elastic\elasticsearch\bin>elasticsearch

9. Check if your elastic search is working by pointing your browser to localhost:9200

You should get something like this.

10. Now reboot your server so you can test that everything is automatically starting on boot.

Congrats you have installed it!

 

Some Tips:

To clear elasticsearch cache
1. Install curl - http://www.confusedbycode.com/curl/
2    run from cmd - curl -XDELETE "http://localhost:9200/_all"

Starting logstash
logstash.bat agent -f logstash.conf
 
To check if the logstash config file is correct with parameters
  logstash.bat agent -f logstash.conf --configte

Setting up the Logstash and ElasticSearch to run as an automatic service.

1.  Start elasticsearch and put it on autostart
Open a console and go to "c:\Elastic\elasticsearch\bin\" & type the following command:

service install

You should get service has installed

Now type – service manager and  something similar to below should appear

 

You have to change on the tab the "Startup type" from Manual to Automatic and then press Apply this should make Elasticsearch start automatically on server boot.
This window contains some more options such as how much memory Elasticsearch will use you can find this on the "Java" tab I would suggest to make this fitting for your server if you have a servers that will handle a huge amount of logs I would increase the "Maximum Memory Pool: 1024" at least to a higher amount.
Before you close the window make sure to press "Start" so it actually will run right now

This is everything to start ElasticSearch automatically on boot to test that it is working open a browser and go to the url you used in IIS  or go to: //127.0.0.1:9200/
If you see a json string something like what you saw in step 9  picture then it means your Elasticsearch is running

2. Create a Logstash startup bat file

A “run.bat" should simply contain this line -

logstash.bat agent –f  logstash.conf

Now place your "run.bat" in the folder: C:\Elastic\logstash\bin

3. Start Logstash & Autostart it
For this step we need another small program to create a proper windows service so please go ahead and download "NSSM" (the Non-Sucking Service Manager)

Once you have the zip file simply unzip it and copy the file from the unzipped folder you now have: "nssm-2.24\win64" (nssm.exe) to "C:\Elastic\logstash\bin" so it should result in you having "C:\Elastic\logstash\bin\nssm.exe".
Now open a Command Prompt and type:

cd c:\Elastic\lostash\bin

nssm install logstash

Ensure you have the details filled as below

Also make sure that "Startup type" is on Automatic.

Now the following step is additional but recommended if you are 100% going to use Elasticsearch, click on the "Dependencies" tab and add the following: elasticsearch-service-x64

The reason for this step is that Logstash can do difficult if you have a Elasticsearch output but it is not actually running.
Now this is all so press on the "Install service" button to finish setting up a service for Logstash.

Now, you actually can stop and start Logstash or Elasticsearch, easily from  "services.msc" as they are now windows services.

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