Ask HN: Scriptable command line browser?

by adatta02 on 11/15/2009, 7:41 PM with 19 comments

Basically what I'm looking to do is use Selenium IDE (http://seleniumhq.org/) on Firefox to generate some regression tests but then I want to replay them without having to fire up X11 and Firefox.

I found ELinks (http://elinks.or.cz) which is a text based browser with Lua support but it seems like it would be a good amount of work to write a Selenium binding.

Anyone know anything better?

  • by macemoneta on 11/15/2009, 9:39 PM

    Lynx can record a session and play it back, which makes it easy to create tests. The sessions are easily edited too. It's available in the repositories of most Linux distributions, or here:

    http://www.lynxbrowser.com/

  • by cschneid on 11/15/2009, 8:19 PM

    Something I've looked at: http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/

    Also, I'm not sure how they do it, but Jaxer (http://www.jaxer.org/) has a headless firefox instance they use. Maybe do it in a similar manner?

  • by jamesbritt on 11/16/2009, 12:54 AM

    A tool such as Tourbus might work. It's a Ruby app meant to stress test Web sites. It uses Webrat and (I think) Mechanize underneath, and does not open any browsers.

    If the site in question has scripting you're out of luck, but otherwise it should be quite useful.

    In fact, I found yourself using both Tourbus and Selenium on a project, and decided I didn't want to have duplicate tests, so I wrote some helper code to allow Tourbus to execute my Selenium scripts. So far, so good. I can record the actions in the Selenium 'IDE' plugin, and use them in Tourbus.

    http://github.com/dbrady/tourbus

  • by agazso on 11/15/2009, 11:10 PM

    If all you want is server side automation, then you can try Xvfb, which is a virtual X server capable of running X applications.

    On a related subject I used Watin (.net) for browser automation and learned, that it was modeled after Watir, which is the same in ruby. See http://watir.com.

  • by coffee on 11/15/2009, 9:23 PM

    If into Ruby, I saw a presentation on how to do what your looking for, check out: http://jjinux.blogspot.com/2009/10/ruby-introduction-to-beha... - Should be a good starting point...

  • by vithlani on 11/15/2009, 11:35 PM

    Please take a look at Chickenfoot

    http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/chickenfoot/index.php

    maybe it does what you want? I was very impressed with a video I had seen about it a couple of years ago.

  • by flashingpumpkin on 11/15/2009, 11:19 PM

    I think Twill might suit you. Have a look at the example. http://twill.idyll.org/examples.html

  • by rudin on 11/16/2009, 8:12 AM

    Maybe give vimperator a try. It is a plugin for firefox that gives it a vim feeling. I think you can write scripts for it too.

  • by Shamiq on 11/15/2009, 9:40 PM

    Wait, so Selenium RC not hitting the spot for you?

  • by vorador on 11/15/2009, 10:14 PM

    Have you considered using script(1) ?

  • by leif on 11/15/2009, 10:56 PM

    uzbl is interesting, but I don't think it's exactly what you're looking for