Installing Selenium 2 On Mac OS As Service

Selenium 2 is a powerful browser emulator which enables you to automate frontend testing (especially JavaScript heavy pages). It can be used with Behat as well for BDD testing.

I prefer using Goutte headless driver to test basic functionality and flow of the application but sometimes there are critical parts of the app that rely heavily on client side technologies like JavaScript. Only way to test to those is to use a browser emulator (Selenium 2, Sahi etc). Enough talking, here is how I installed Selenium 2 server on Mac OS as a service:

wget https://selenium.googlecode.com/files/selenium-server-standalone-2.33.0.jar

sudo mkdir /usr/lib/selenium

sudo mv selenium-server-standalone-2.33.0.jar /usr/lib/selenium

sudo mkdir /var/log/selenium

sudo chmod -R a+w /var/log/selenium

Then you need to create a new file:

sudo nano ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.nhabit.Selenium.plist

With contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>org.nhabit.Selenium</string>
        <key>OnDemand</key>
        <true/>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/usr/bin/java</string>
                <string>-jar</string>
                <string>/usr/lib/selenium/selenium-server-standalone-2.33.0.jar</string>
                <string>-port</string>
                <string>4443</string>
        </array>
        <key>ServiceDescription</key>
        <string>Selenium Server</string>
        <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
        <string>/var/log/selenium/selenium-error.log</string>
        <key>StandardOutPath</key>
        <string>/var/log/selenium/selenium-output.log</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Load the service:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.nhabit.Selenium.plist
launchctl start org.nhabit.Selenium

You can also check it’s running:

ps aux | grep selenium

richardknop    19880   0.0  0.5  2859020  76648   ??  S     2:09pm   0:07.05 /usr/bin/java -jar /usr/lib/selenium/selenium-server-standalone-2.33.0.jar -port 4443
richardknop    20852   0.0  0.0  2432768    596 s001  R+    3:17pm   0:00.00 grep selenium

And error logs, just in case you need them:

tail -f /var/log/selenium/selenium-error.log