Dynamically setting the $browsers static property in Sauce.io phpunit selenium tests

Question

I am setting up some browser testing using SauceLabs. I've been able to get tests running locally and via Sauce, so I am now trying to integrate it with my Jenkins install to trigger builds and browser tests automatically.

Most of this is all working, but I have one small issue. So that I can run my tests locally and via Sauce, I want to set the $browsers static property during the phpUnit setup() function, rather than hardcoding it. This doesn't seem possible.

I'm using the Sausage binding, my TestCase looks pretty similar to this demo: https://github.com/jlipps/sausage/blob/master/WebDriverDemo.php

I have tried in setUp() to update the $browsers array, but it never seems to take effect. eg.

public function setUp()
{   
    self::$browsers = array(
        'browserName' => getenv('SELENIUM_BROWSER'),
        'desiredCapabilities' => array(
            'version' => getenv('SELENIUM_VERSION'),
            'platform' => getenv('SELENIUM_PLATFORM'),
         )
     );
}

Is there a way to pass the browser details from Jenkins so the test cases are more flexible? I feel like I'm missing something simple here?

Answer 1

Ok, so I worked this out. Should anyone else have the same issue, here's how I resolved it.

In the ANT script that Jenkins runs, which runs PHPUnit in turn, I included a config.xml file. This sets a config (environment) variable called sauce to true

<phpunit> 
    <php>
        <env name="sauce" value="true" />
    </php>
</phpunit>

Now the trick is to not actually use the $browsers static array, but instead to use the setupSpecificBrowser method. So , now in my setUp() function of my tests, I just switch on the sauce env variable and if it exists then I know we are running from Jenkins and so I use the supplied variables from it.

    if( getenv('sauce') == true) {
        $browser =  array(
                'browserName' => getenv('SELENIUM_BROWSER'),
                'desiredCapabilities' => array(
                        'version' => getenv('SELENIUM_VERSION'),
                        'platform' => getenv('SELENIUM_PLATFORM'),
                )
        );
    } else {
        $browser =  array(
                'browserName' => 'firefox',
                'local' => true,
                'sessionStrategy' => 'isolated'
        );
    }
    $this->setupSpecificBrowser($browser);

AFAIK there doesn't seem to be any documentation for this, I just worked it from from looking at the code. Fun.