writing selenium in javascript node with webdriverio - instructions for impatients

The following is what you need to do in order to write a javascript program that will command your browser through selenium using webdriver.io node library.

 First is about installing and running the selenium server. Second is a little webdriverio example. 

Installing the selenium server

The following instructions are give in a shell script that was tested on mac:

#install java

# download selenium server: 

curl -O http://selenium-release.storage.googleapis.com/2.53/selenium-server-standalone-2.53.0.jar

#download googlechrome selenium drivers: 

curl -O http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/2.22/chromedriver_mac32.zip
unzip chromedriver_mac32.zip


#Execute selenium server: 

java -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=./chromedriver -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.53.0.jar

The Program

From here the instructions are the same as in http://webdriver.io/guide.html - just execute ```npm install webdriverio``` in your node project and execute the following file. In this simple program that will navigate to google and when is ready print the document title in the console:

var webdriverio = require('webdriverio');
var options = {
    desiredCapabilities: {
        browserName: 'chrome'
    }
};
webdriverio
    .remote(options)
    .init()
    .url('http://www.google.com')
    .getTitle().then(function(title) {
        console.log('Title was: ' + title);
    })
    .end();

Appendix: Technologies used

• http://www.seleniumhq.org/ - the infrastructure that talks to browsers (java) 
• http://webdriver.io/guide.html - the selenium javascript api 
• http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html - selenium driver to manage chrome browser.
• java and node