watir-webdriver and Sauce Labs OnDemand

For a couple of clients I have been running watir-webdriver tests using Sauce Labs OnDemand. Never heard about it? In short, instead of driving a browser at your local machine, you can drive a browser in the cloud. Sounds cool, right?

What changes should you do to your existing watir-webdriver scripts to run them in the cloud?

This would open Firefox at your local machine:

require "rubygems"
require "watir-webdriver"
browser = Watir::Browser.new :firefox

And this would open Firefox at Sauce Labs OnDemand:

require "watir-webdriver"
caps = Selenium::WebDriver::Remote::Capabilities.firefox
caps.version = "11"
caps.platform = :LINUX
caps[:name] = "testing this cloud thing"
browser = Watir::Browser.new(
  :remote,
  :url => "http://username:api-key@ondemand.saucelabs.com:80/wd/hub",
  :desired_capabilities => caps)

You have to replace username and api-key with your username and API key. If you do not have saucelabs.com account, you can get one for free. Free account has limitation of 200 minutes of driving a browser per month, but that is more than enough to try.

You can run the above code by pasting it into IRB, or paste it into a Ruby file (named cloud.rb, for example) and just run the file from command line.

After the browser is opened, you can drive it as usual.

Now go to https://saucelabs.com/jobs and there should be a test with status running and name testing this cloud thing.

Click the test name and you will see live video of the browser running in the cloud. After the test is finished you will be able to view the video and see the screenshots that (I think) are automatically taken for every page that the browser opens.