St Bernard

St Bernard is a simple series of webpages used to demonstrate the howling success of the Hound testing tool.

Whatever you call it, UI testing/End-to-End Testing/End-to-User Testing/Acceptance Testing--it is often an intensely manual and time-consuming process. Hound carries some of the load through browser automation. Browser automations means that I can automate my user interactions — clicks, fill inputs, file uploads, selecting options, radio buttons, etc. I use this app to demonstrate an overview of Hound and it’s helpers, as well as an example of how Hound tests saved me days of manual end-user testing.

Bone Simple Creation

Create a simple Phoenix called St Bernard.

$ mix phx.new stbernard --no-ecto

Add Hound as a dependency in mix.exs.

{:hound, "~> 1.0"}

Hound requires a webdriver for browser automation. We will use selenium. Install and run:

$ brew install selenium-server-standalone
$ selenium-server

Start Hound in test/test_helpers.exs. Add this above ExUnit.start()

Application.ensure_all_started(:hound)

In config/test.exs add:

config :hound, browser: "chrome"

. . . and set server to true:

config :stbernard, StbernardWeb.Endpoint,
  http: [port: 4001],
  server: true

Start the Phoenix server

• install dependencies with mix deps.get
• install Node.js dependencies with cd assets && npm install
• start interactive elixir: iex -S mix phx.server
• visit localhost:4000 from your browser.

Run tests (in this demo app, Hound is used as a part of ExUnit tests)

$ mix test

Lab-ra-cadabra!

The acceptance tests live in test/stbernard_web/integration/

- test/
  - stbernard_web/
    - acceptance/
      - form_test.exs
      - charge_test.exs
      - welcome_test.exs
  - test_helper.exs

Simple welcome_test.exs

• navigate_to/2
  • navigates to a url or relative path
• find_element/3
  • accepts a strategy, selector, and optional retries value
• visible_text/1
  • gets the visible text of an element
• page_title/0
  • gets the title of the current page

Complex form_test.exs

• the :xpath strategy
• click/1
  • clicks on an element
• current_url/0
  • gets url of the current page
• uses execute_script/2 to select value from a select list
  • executes javascripts
• fill_field/2
  • sets a field's value
• uses change_session_to/2 to use multiple browser sessions for permutations
• take_screenshot/1
  • takes a screenshot of the current page
• slow down tests with :timer.sleep()

TODO

• demonstrate how to select a value from an autocomplete input field with Awesomplete
• demonstrate Metadata in Hound session
• demonstrate change_session_to/2 to use multiple browser sessions for permutations

Go Fetch!

• Hound Helpers, in particular
  • Hound Navigation Helpers
  • Hound Element Helpers
  • Hound Javascript Execution Helpers
  • Hound Screenshot Helpers
• Configuring Hound: https://github.com/HashNuke/hound/blob/master/notes/configuring-hound.md
• Official website: http://www.phoenixframework.org/
• Guides: http://phoenixframework.org/docs/overview
• Docs: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix
• Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/phoenix-talk
• Source: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix