How can I run selenium tests on browserstack.com?

Question

Say I want to perform the following test on my website:

• Load it into the browser.
• Click on a button, which performs some Javascript.
• Wait for the Javascript action to complete.
• Look at how the page appears now.

I know how to create a Selenium test for this. I know also how to perform this test on browserstack.com manually, that is, by starting a BrowserStack VM for each browser I need, and then perform these steps.

How can I combine the Selenium test (can be in JS or C# or whatever) with BrowserStack, so that BrowserStack executes the test in all browsers I need, and then sends some report to me, like a bunch of screenshots?

BrowserStack provides some small documentation about TestSwarm and Selenium at http://www.browserstack.com/automated-browser-testing-api, but since I'm absolutely new to the web testing topic, I don't see how BrowserStack, Selenium and maybe TestSwarm interact together.

EDIT: Selenium and Testswarm are just examples, I don't prefer any framework, I just need to automate BrowserStack.

Answer 1

I don't think it's possible at this time...

Their localhost testing doc gives an example of how their command line works:

Command line interface

java -jar BrowserStackTunnel.jar TI3PnSeogaDEcwSyiSzm localhost,3000,0

In my experience with selenium, that doesn't leave any way of launching the selenium test.

Here's an example of how I call a selenium test:

java -Dpfile="../properties/ff-test.properties" -jar ../runselenium.jar ca.myorg.tests.HappyPathTest 

I just received an email from them that promised full support for selenium sometime next month (May, 2013):

We are working on implementing full scale automated testing including Selenium and expect it to be released sometime next month. We will notify you personally once done.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

BrowserStack.com now supports selenium testing end to end under the name Automate. There is a documentation to help you get started with sample code of quite a few programming languages. As with other products, tunnel and several other features are already integrated.

Full disclosure: I work for BrowserStack.com.

Answer 3

Currently it is really easy to run automatic tasks on Selenium. Browserstack created really nice documentation (which covers different languages). For instance here is the way how you need to do this for C#. So all you need is to modify a little bit your selenium tests, get your API-key (if you will subscribe to a this service it will be already on the page) and select OS/Browser/Device you want your tests to be done.

using System;
using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Remote;

namespace SeleniumTest {
  class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
      IWebDriver driver;
      DesiredCapabilities capability = DesiredCapabilities.Firefox();
      capability.SetCapability("browserstack.user", "USER_ID");
      capability.SetCapability("browserstack.key", "API_KEY");

      driver = new RemoteWebDriver(
        new Uri("http://hub.browserstack.com/wd/hub/"), capability
      );
      driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://www.google.com/ncr");
      Console.WriteLine(driver.Title);

      IWebElement query = driver.FindElement(By.Name("q"));
      query.SendKeys("Salvador Dali");
      query.Submit();
      Console.WriteLine(driver.Title);

      driver.Quit();
    }
  }
}

As you see, everything is almost the same as your selenium test. You can also create screenshots from selenium as well as with their screenshot API