The Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a tool that you can use to develop your Selenium test cases. It's a Firefox plugin and is generally the most efficient way to develop test cases.

It also allows us to save all of our tests in a useful test suite, or to export it in the PHPUnit test format.

To install it, we have to download it, using the Firefox browser, from http://seleniumhq.org/download/.

Now, as we can see in this screenshot, Firefox will ask us to install the new component and then restart it in order to use the new extension.

We can now use the Selenium IDE to record our first test session. We will see how to create a simple test, but you can play with the IDE to make the best use of all of its features.

Open your browser , and navigate to the site URL (in our case, http://packtmediaproject). In the Tools menu of Firefox, select the Selenium IDE option, as shown here:

The IDE will then open, and we can start recording our session by clicking on the record button (in red) located on the rightmost side of the IDE window, as seen here:

Now every time we use the browser Selenium, we will record our actions to create a test. For example, we will test the Forum to see if it works correctly.

Click on the Forum link in the navigation menu of the site, and take a look at the IDE to see what it has registered:

As you can see in the previous screenshot, Selenium recorded an open action for the index and a click on the link. The clickAndWait command means that the IDE will wait for a complete render of the page from the browser before testing its content.

Browsing a site with Selenium should be sufficient in most cases, but sometimes you also need to check for the page contents. Starting from the previous test, we will extend it to check to see if the page contains the forum we created.

Now, stop the recording and choose the assertText command in the Command select box of the IDE. This will be used to confirm the existence of a string in the XPath position. Now, in the Target input area, we have to specify the XPath path where we want to check the text filled, in the Value field.

As you can see in our example screenshot, we have to check that the forum name is Tech and gadgets.

Save your test from the File menu and play it using the Play current test case button, to check if everything is fine, as shown in the following screenshot:

We suggest that you create as many tests like this as possible to cover all of the pages of the site, which would assure good quality assurance coverage.

To create useful tests, read the Selenium IDE documentation and tutorial at http://seleniumhq.org/docs/03_selenium_ide.html#building-test-cases.

To copy the development files to the staging server, we will use the eZ Deploy extension. This extension was specifically created for this kind of tasks, and uses the rSync protocol to send and synchronize the code from one server to another. The extension will send the files incrementally, so that only the changed files will be sent from one deployment to another.

We have to configure the extension so that it works with the servers where we want to deploy the files. To do this, we have to edit the sync.ini.append.php file located in the settings directory of the extension.

cd /var/www/packtmediaproject/extension/ezsync
vi settings/sync.ini.append.php

Let's suppose that we have the staging server in a subdomain of the packtmediamagazine.com domain, and then add the following lines:

[DefaultSyncSettings]
Host=
Dir=
User=
Port=22
Parameters=
FileRsyncEclude=extension/ezsync/settings/rsync_exclude.txt
[StagingSyncSettings]
Dir=/var/www/staging
Host=staging.packtmediamagazine.com
User=packtmedia
[ProductionSyncSettings]
Dir=/var/www/production
Host=www.packtmediamagazine.com
User=packtmedia

As you can see, the StagingSyncSettings section is used to configure the staging server, whereas the ProductionSyncSettings section is used for the production server. If you want to create other environments, you should easily create new deployment configurations by adding new sections.

The Dir parameter specifies the remote directory where rSync will place the files, the Host is the remote server to contact, and the User is the SSH user that will have write permission on the Dir directory.

We should also exclude files from the synchronization directories, or files that are used only in the development process, or that are generated by the CMF cache system. To do so, we have to edit the file named rsync_exclude.txt, which can be found inside the extension settings directory.

cd /var/www/packtmediaproject/extension/ezsync
vi settings/rsync_exclude.txt

We need to add the names of the files and directory that we want to exclude, by editing the rsync_exclude.txt file and adding the following lines:

.svn
var/*
update
doc

This will ensure that, on the staging or production server, we will not copy the subversion directories, the local cache, the update script, and all the documentation we created for internal development that is not suitable for publishing on the Web.

After configuring the extension, we have to move back to the root of the eZ Publish installation and execute the sync script in the dry-run mode:

cd /var/www/packtmediaproject/
php extension/ezsync/bin/php/sync.php --env=staging

The dry-run mode will not send anything, but it will show us which files will be sent during the real deployment. To execute this, we have to add the --go parameter to the shell script:

php extension/ezsync/bin/php/sync.php --env=staging --go

Now the site has been deployed to the staging server.