Browser testing

Buster.JS offers multiple ways of running your tests in browsers. This document describes three ways, ranging from simple setup to most useful (if that’s a scale).

Running with buster-server

Inspired by JsTestDriver, Buster.JS can automate browsers seamlessly and provide feedback anywhere you want, making running your tests in actual browsers easy and painless. Hell, it even makes it fun.

First, start a server:

../_images/buster-server-start.png

Then, capture how many browsers you want:

../_images/buster-server-capture-firefox.png

And simultaneously run tests on all the captured browsers:

../_images/buster-test-run-browsers.png

Running with buster-static

In the cases where you need a simpler method for running tests, but don’t care for the manual HTML scaffold (see next section), Buster.JS can serve the scaffold for you based on your configuration.

Start the server:

../_images/buster-static-start.png

Open the page in the browser and watch the tests run immediately:

../_images/buster-static-success.png

Write to disk with buster-static

If you specifiy a directory when executing buster-static, no sever will be started. Instead the files needed for the test run are written into this directory. All you have to do to run the tests is to open the index.html file in a browser.

../_images/writeToDisk.png

Using an HTML scaffold

Warning

This is still an experimental feature, but should work fine.

The simplest way to try Buster.JS is to copy the following code, save it to a file and run it in a browser:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
           "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    <title>strftime</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://cdn.busterjs.org/releases/latest/buster-test.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://cdn.busterjs.org/examples/strftime/strftime.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://cdn.busterjs.org/examples/strftime/strftime-test.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>

Go ahead, try it.

If you use Git, you can clone this example to your machine:

git clone git://gist.github.com/1904218.git gist-1904218

Note

If you opt for downloading the script locally, remember to get the CSS file too. When using the pre-built library, there’s no installation, but you also miss out on much of the automation sweetness.

Running headless with PhantomJS

You can run browser tests headless with PhantomJS very easy by starting the server with option -c.

../_images/headless-browser.png

You must have installed PhantomJS on your system of course.

Continues Integration

You can run the buster server, capture browsers, on the local or remote machine, run tests, close the browsers and shutdown the server with only one command: buster-ci.

Examples

Check the demos repository for example projects.