Cucumber is a popular test automation tool that supports Behavior Driven Development(BDD). It's been largely adopted for automated GUI test in CI/CD pipelines. It uses its unique DSL (the Gherkin language) to write executable test specifications in plain text and validates whether a piece of software works as specified. More detailed introductions and tutorials can be found on its documentation page.
For GUI tests, internally cucumber runs on the Selenium webdriver and often it's found not easy to properly configure a cucumber running environment, and the environment itself is fragile with dependency changes. This is particularly true when trying to make Slenium works with the FireFox browser. Version compatibility is a little devil poking around. Hence an idea occurs to me that such configurations can be managed within a docker container, such that package dependencies, Ruby gem versions and browser versions can be persisted. A container also provides an isolated test running environment that is immune to changes at host level.
This repository contains a Dockerfile that creates a docker container which runs Xvfb, X11VNC, SSH, NGINX, Firefox and Ruby services. Cucumber GUI tests can be run inside the container with test reports exposed through NGINX static web service.
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SSH is used to provide encrypted data communication between the docker container and remote client machines.
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Xvfb creates a virtual display where GUI tests can be run.
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X11vnc creates a VNC session against the virtual display that can be accessed through a VNC viewer remotely (add-on, not compulsory)
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NGINX is used to serve the static contents of the cucumber test results through HTTP.
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A customized HTML formatter was written under the features/support folder to generate separated HTML reports for each feature.
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An XSLT file junit-noframes.xsl was written to compile the JUnit XML reports into a consolidated HTML report.
A Linux system (or any other OS that works for you) with docker installed.
Clone the repository, build the docker image and run it. The APP_BUILD and TEST_PHASE environment variables are used to construct reporting URLs.
docker build -t cucumber -f Dockerfile.setup --build-arg APP_BUILD=build --build-arg TEST_PHASE=bvt .
CONTAINER_ID=$(docker run -d -P -p 9080:80 cucumber)
This will expose 3 ports from the container, SSH(22), VNC(5900) and TCP(80). Use below command to checkout the port numbers.
docker ps -a
Navigate into the container with bash interface if needed (e.g. check user password from userpwd.txt).
docker exec -i -t $CONTAINER_ID /bin/bash
Connect to the docker container remotely via SSH (cobalt is the user name created in the image).
ssh cobalt@<docker_host_ip> -p <ssh_port_number>
Connect to the virtual display via TigerVNC viewer (password: cobalt).
<docker_host_ip>:<vnc_port_number>
Once the cucumber scripts are finished with running, view the test results report in HTML, test logs and screen shots via a browser.
http://<docker_host_ip>:9080
Contact the owner before contributing.
- Fork the repository on Github
- Create a named feature branch (like
add_component_x) - Write your change
- Write tests for your change (if applicable)
- Run the tests, ensuring they all pass
- Submit a Pull Request using Github
- Ruifeng Ma (mrfflyer@gmail.com)