grunt-start-webdriver

only starts the selenium webdriver

There are several plugins out there that will launch an instance of selenium-webdriver for you, but it is usually for a specific purpose. I was setting up a protractor auto-test workflow using grunt, and really only wanted a task that would start the webdriver, block until it was ready to accept connections, and then leave it running in the background until the grunt process finished.

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt.

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-start-webdriver --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-start-webdriver');

The "start_webdriver" task

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named webdriver to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
  webdriver: {
    options: {
      // Task-specific options go here.
    },
    your_target: {
      // Target-specific file lists and/or options go here.
    },
  },
})

Options

options.debug

Type: boolean Default value: false

selenium webdriver is fairly verbose in its output, so it is hidden by default. Setting debug to true will pipe the output to the console.

options.startCommand

Type: String Default value: 'webdriver-manager start'

Set this value to customize how selenium is started. The default assumes the presence of protractor on the path, and uses the webdriver-manager script (which it provides).

Usage Examples

Default Options

grunt.initConfig({
  webdriver: {
    options: {},
  },
})

Custom Options

grunt.initConfig({
  webdriver: {
    options: {
      separator: ': ',
      punctuation: ' !!!',
    }
  },
})

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your code using Grunt.

Release History

• v0.0.1 - initial

License

Copyright (c) 2014 Matt Briggs. Licensed under the MIT license.