i am daniel gempesaw [home]

Last year, Selenium introduced WebDriver, an automated browser program that runs the browser in the same way that a user would.  Saucelabs offers a way to test multiple browsers on multiple operating systems in parallel, completely automated, by running the Selenium software and selling time on their servers. Perl is fun. Saucelabs doesn’t have documentation for connecting to their OnDemand service using WebDriver and Perl, so I’d like to explain how to do that. 

Using Gordon Child’s Selenium::Remote::Driver, it’s pretty straightforward to use Perl to run tests on Saucelabs using WebDriver. Get Selenium::Remote::Driver if you don’t have it (sudo CPAN install Selenium::Remote::Driver). 

#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Selenium::Remote::Driver;

my $desc = "perl webdriver bindings and selenium!";

my $login = "loginName";
my $apiKey = "myApiKey";
my $host = "$login:$apiKey\@ondemand.saucelabs.com";

my $driver = new Selenium::Remote::Driver(
                          'remote_server_addr' => $host,
                          'port' => "80",
                          'browser_name' => "firefox",
                          'version' => "7",
                          'platform' => "WINDOWS",
                          'extra_capabilities' => {'name' => $desc},
                          );
$driver->get('http://www.google.com');
print $driver->get_title();
$driver->quit();

Plugin your login name and api key and that should get you up and running. The script opens FF7 on Windows 2003, gets google.com and outputs “Google” as the title of the webpage. 

For anyone using the Selenium RC WWW::Selenium bindings, things are a bit different in Selenium::Remote::Driver - namely, many of the events (clicking, getting information) are done as methods to a new Selenium::Remote::WebElement object, not the selenium driver object. It was a bit of a pain to migrate over, but I think it’s a lot cleaner now. So far, everything I did with WWW::Selenium I’ve been able to duplicate with Selenium::Remote::Driver, and in most cases it’s much simpler and more elegant :)

At my work I ssh into a linux box somewhere in the cloud. Since I’m not Ops, I don’t have root access on the box, but I am consistently running into situations where I need to install modules from CPAN on to the box. Without sudo, I was having a lot of trouble writing code with new functionality and not being able to utilize the CPAN library.

But, luckily, stackoverflow came to my rescue. Or, in particular, Chas Owens did, with the following simple three lines:

wget -O- http://cpanmin.us | perl - -l ~/perl5 App::cpanminus local::lib
eval `perl -I ~/perl5/lib/perl5 -Mlocal::lib`
echo 'eval `perl -I ~/perl5/lib/perl5 -Mlocal::lib`' >> ~/.profile

So, the first line runs a script to install App::cpanminus and local::lib. cpanm is CPAN without all the customization options, so you can just cpanm Module::Name and not worry about a thing. local::lib lets you install to non-root directories. The second line uses local::lib to tell perl where to look for the new modules, and the third line exports it to ones .bash_profile so it’s used each time we log in.

Finally, since the scripts I’m writing actually get run as root, 

use lib("~/perl5/lib/perl5");

I just have to insert that line into my script to tell perl where to look. 

tl;dr - I <3 CPAN & stackoverflow.

getfastgetstrong:

On an extremely simple level, offense can be broken down into five rules:

1. Take what they give you.

2. If you really want something they’re not giving you, try to fake them into giving it to you.

3. If you’re not sure exactly what you want, fake until they give you something, then take it.

4. Actively get out of the way when someone else is making a better cut.

5. Make smart choices with your throws.

6. (optional) If you smell even the slightest whiff of anyone going deep (cutter, handler, sideline players, opposing team’s coach, etc), send it promptly.

PS: Don’t actually do 6 unless you’re willing to accept the consequences (ensuing hilarity, wildly negative personal stats, scarcity of teammates willing to pass to you)

(via fuckyeahultimate)