Category: selenium

Regression testing releases with Depicted (Dpxdt), Travis, & Saucelabs

Depicted is a release testing tool that compares before and after screenshots of your webpage, highlighting differences between the two.

Depicted supplements your release testing by allowing you to approve any visual changes a new release may cause.

I wrote a script during my time at Sprintly that would take a TravisCI build ID, pull related screenshots from our Saucelabs selenium tests, and upload them to a Depicted API server for comparison.

Before a new release would be deployed, we would manually run our Depicted release script and check and approve any changes.

This script was integrated as a Django management command for ease of use. Check out the full script below with comments.

Firefox & python Selenium: Stopping auto update on browser test runs

Found a minor annoyance when running headless selenium browser tests on Ubuntu server 16. For some reason automated tests would start failing when opening Firefox. Apparently the configuration i’m running allows for Firefox to run auto update when opened.

To stop Firefox auto updates during your python Selenium test run, load a custom profile:

from selenium import webdriver

profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
profile.set_preference('app.update.auto', False)
profile.set_preference('app.update.enabled', False)

driver = webdriver.Firefox(profile)

If this doesn’t seem to do the trick, verify that apt unattended-upgrades are not causing this behavior. In one case, I saw that the update was happening in the /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-dpkg.log log file.

I disabled auto updates via apt globally with the command:

dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades