Hound

For browser automation and writing integration tests in Elixir.

Features

Can run multiple browser sessions simultaneously. See example.
Supports Selenium (Firefox, Chrome), ChromeDriver and PhantomJs.
Supports Javascript-heavy apps. Retries a few times before reporting error.
Implements the WebDriver Wire Protocol.

Internet Explorer may work under Selenium, but hasn't been tested.

Example

ExUnit example

defmodule HoundTest do
  use ExUnit.Case
  use Hound.Helpers

  hound_session()

  test "the truth", meta do
    navigate_to("http://example.com/guestbook.html")

    element = find_element(:name, "message")
    fill_field(element, "Happy Birthday ~!")
    submit_element(element)

    assert page_title() == "Thank you"
  end

end

Here's another simple browser-automation example.

Setup

Hound requires Elixir 1.0.4 or higher.

Add dependency to your mix project

{:hound, "~> 1.0"}

Start Hound in your test/test_helper.exs file before the ExUnit.start() line:

Application.ensure_all_started(:hound)
ExUnit.start()

When you run mix test, Hound is automatically started. You'll need a webdriver server running, like Selenium Server or Chrome Driver. If you aren't sure what it is, then read this.

If you're using Phoenix

Ensure the server is started when your tests are run. In config/test.exs change the server option of your endpoint config to true:

config :hello_world_web, HelloWorldWeb.Endpoint,
  http: [port: 4001],
  server: true

Configure

To configure Hound, use your config/config.exs file or equivalent.

Example:

config :hound, driver: "phantomjs"

More examples here.

Usage

Add the following lines to your ExUnit test files.

# Import helpers
use Hound.Helpers

# Start hound session and destroy when tests are run
hound_session()

If you prefer to manually start and end sessions, use Hound.start_session and Hound.end_session in the setup and teardown blocks of your tests.

Helpers

The documentation pages include examples under each function.

The docs are at http://hexdocs.pm/hound.

More examples? Checkout Hound's own test cases

FAQ

Can I run multiple browser sessions simultaneously

Oh yeah ~! Here is an example.

If you are running PhantomJs, take a look at the Caveats section below.

Can I run tests async?

Yes.

The number of tests you can run async at any point in time, depends on the number of sessions that your webdriver can maintain at a time. For Selenium Standalone, there seems to be a default limit of 15 sessions. You can set ExUnit's async option to limit the number of tests to run parallelly.

Will Hound guarantee an isolated session per test?

Yes. A separate session is started for each test process.

PhantomJs caveats

PhantomJs is extremely fast, but there are certain caveats. It uses Ghostdriver for its webdriver server, which currently has unimplemented features or open issues.

Cookie jar isn't separate for sessions - ariya/phantomjs#11417 Which means all sessions share the same cookies. Make sure you run delete_cookies() at the end of each test.
Isolated sessions were added to GhostDriver recently and are yet to land in a PhantomJs release.
Javascript alerts aren't yet supported - https://github.com/detro/ghostdriver/issues/20.

Running tests

You need a webdriver in order to run tests. We recommend phantomjs but any can be used by setting the WEBDRIVER environment variable as shown below:

$ phantomjs --wd
$ WEBDRIVER=phantomjs mix test

Maintainers

Akash Manohar (HashNuke)
Daniel Perez (tuvistavie)

michallepicki/hound