Running Selenium Server & ChromeDriver as a Windows Service

Question

So that we may perform front-to-back web UI testing, we are using Selenium and ChromeDriver to automate page loads / interaction as part of our testing pack.

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Answer 1

we don't use selenium GRID, we were disappointed with its stability. We use a "Jenkins Grid", that is jenkins slaves nodes on various servers.

The slaves are services with the interact with desktop flag. They run as services with NSSM, and the SERVICE_INTERACTIVE_PROCESS flag. Making sure that NoInteractiveProcess is set to 1 (cf https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/services/interactive-services).

We don't have the fancy features of the grid (that is balancing according the browser types slots). Instead, we have Jenkins balancing the test jobs using a slave node or another. Initially we did not use the interact with desktop flag, having browsers to run without "real" display, but the behavior was not very stable (especially with resize commands). Hope this helps.