UPDATE (June 17th): I’ve updated the code, see the reasons for it at the end of the post.

In previous projects I worked on we made sure the Selenium Java server was running by manually starting it on our machines (both developers’ and build ones). This was cumbersome: restarting the build server meant we had to log on to the server after the reboot and run the Selenium server again. Of course, a lot of times we forgot to do this, which caused the build to fail.

This got me into thinking: is there a way in Gallio to specify some initialization (and cleanup) actions on the test assembly level? And of course, the answer is yes: using the AssemblyFixture attribute. This is what I like about Gallio/MbUnit: most of the time the feature requests I come up with are actually already implemented.

So anyway, you can specify this attribute on a class and then add FixtureSetUp and FixtureTearDown attributes on its methods. These will be executed on the test assembly-level: setup methods will be executed before any test fixtures have been run and teardown methods will be executed before the test assembly has been unloaded by the test runner.

I then used this nice feature to start the Selenium server and then dispose of it after tests:

[AssemblyFixture]
public class SeleniumTestingSetup : IDisposable
{
    [FixtureSetUp]
    public void Setup()
    {
        seleniumServerProcess = new Process();
        seleniumServerProcess.StartInfo.FileName = "java";
        seleniumServerProcess.StartInfo.Arguments =
            "-jar ../../../lib/Selenium/selenium-server/selenium-server.jar -port 6371";
        seleniumServerProcess.Start();
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Performs application-defined tasks associated with freeing, releasing, or
    /// resetting unmanaged resources.
    /// </summary>
    public void Dispose()
    {
        Dispose(true);
        GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Disposes the object.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="disposing">If <code>false</code>, cleans up native resources. 
    /// If <code>true</code> cleans up both managed and native resources</param>
    protected virtual void Dispose(bool disposing)
    {
        if (false == disposed)
        {
            if (disposing)
                DisposeOfSeleniumServer();

            disposed = true;
        }
    }

    private void DisposeOfSeleniumServer()
    {
        if (seleniumServerProcess != null)
        {
            try
            {
                seleniumServerProcess.Kill();
                bool result = seleniumServerProcess.WaitForExit(10000);
            }
            finally 
            {
                seleniumServerProcess.Dispose();
                seleniumServerProcess = null;
            }
        }
    }

    private bool disposed;
    private Process seleniumServerProcess;
}

Note that the class is disposable – this ensures the Selenium server is stopped even if you run tests in the debugger and then force the debugger to stop before finishing the work. The Dispose method calls DisposeOfSeleniumServer, which does the actual work of killing the process and disposing of the evidence.

NOTE: This is a second version of the code. I needed to update the old one because I noticed that when running the tests in CruiseControl.NET, the Selenium server java process was not stopped properly. The only way I could stop it is by killing it, which in general isn’t a good practice. The unfortunate side effect of this “killing” is that the CruiseContol.NET service cannot be stopped normally – it also has to be killed when you need to restart it. I’ll try to solve this problem in the future.