Tracking tests' network statistics with Docker

Sergey Korol — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Browsermob Proxy Docker image

To be able to use the following example, you’ll need to build docker-browsermob-proxy first. This base Docker image contains latest (2.1.1) Browsermob Proxy (BMP) version.

Docker configuration

Raising newly built image would be quite simple with a help of docker-compose. Here’s a sample BMP / Selenium Grid configuration, which will help you to link all containers together:

seleniumhub:
 image: sskorol/hub:2.53.1
 ports:
 - "4444:4444"
firefoxnode:
 image: sskorol/node-firefox-debug:2.53.1
 volumes:
 - ~/Work:/e2e/uploads
 - ~/Work/tmp:/e2e/uploads/tmp
 ports:
 - "5900"
 expose:
 - "80"
 links:
 - seleniumhub:hub
chromenode:
 image: sskorol/node-chrome-debug:2.53.1
 volumes:
 - ~/Work:/e2e/uploads
 - ~/Work/tmp:/e2e/uploads/tmp
 ports:
 - "5900"
 expose:
 - "80"
 links:
 - seleniumhub:hub
browsermobproxy:
 image: sskorol/browsermob-proxy:2.1.1
 ports:
 - "9090-9191:9090-9191"
 expose:
 - "9090-9191"
 links:
 - seleniumhub:hub_sel
 - firefoxnode:node_ff
 - chromenode:node_ch

If you missed my article about docker-selenium customization, you can pull above images from appropriate fork.

HAR viewer

To provide extensive network statistics in test results reports, we’ll use one of the best HAR Viewer, which supports really nice embedded mode.

Java implementation requires both front-end and backend involvement. You may already know that Allure supports html attachments. To be able to use embedded HAR Viewer, we need to create our own template first. This could be done using mustache library.

Template may look like the following:

Where har-viewer.js is the official script for HAR Viewer embedding.

(function () {
    var har = document.createElement("script");
    har.src = "http://www.softwareishard.com/har/viewer/har.js";
    har.setAttribute("id", "har");
    har.setAttribute("async", "true");
    document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(har);
})();

Note that {{link}} is a mandatory reference to the HAR file, produced while test execution. I left {{height}} option configurable as well, as default value is quite low, and you may want to manage it by yourself depending on screen resolution.

HAR storage

A bit painful topic. I’ve already played with harstorage project, but it seems quite unstable with latest version of BMP, and requires pretty old software dependencies.

To avoid dependencies hell and configuration overhead, we’ll use much easier approach. Produced HAR files will be stored on a lightweight Web Server, e.g. lighttpd, and then referenced in code while HAR template generation.

REST Browsermob Proxy client

To establish connection with docker-browsermob-proxy image via REST we need to find out its internal IP address first. Here’s a script, which could help us:

#!/bin/bash
PROXY_NAME=`docker ps --format {{.Names}} | grep 'proxy'`
IP=`docker inspect --format {{.NetworkSettings.IPAddress}} $PROXY_NAME`
echo $IP

If we execute it from java code, we’ll be able to access remote BMP instance running in Docker container.

REST client is available on GitHub. So you may want to build it first before moving to next parts.

To simplify interaction with proxy there was created a ProxyServer wrapper, which allows establishing connection with a remote server. As I’ve mentioned above, IP address is exposed dynamically, but default port (9090) is consumed from config.properties.

After new BMP instance creation we need to obtain a port, which will be used by WebDriver. Now we’re ready to send a request on HAR file creation.

this.browserMobProxy = new BrowsermobProxyRestClient(this.ip, port);
this.port = browserMobProxy.getPort();
this.browserMobProxy.setPort(this.port);
this.browserMobProxy.newHar(this.initialPageId, true, true, true);

That’s all we need for getting Selenium Proxy instance.

public Proxy getSeleniumProxy() {
	final String actualProxy = ip + ":" + port;
	return new Proxy().setHttpProxy(actualProxy).setFtpProxy(actualProxy).setSslProxy(actualProxy);
}

HAR files processing

Depending on proxy server location, network configuration and HAR size, it could take long to retrieve recorded network statistics. To avoid wasting time on HAR processing, we’ll supply it async via CompletableFuture.

CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> proxy.getBrowserMobProxy().getHarAsString())
	.whenComplete((har, err) -> {
		if (saveHar(HTTPD_DIR + File.separator + harName, har))
			attachHtml(attachmentName, HAR_TEMPLATE, getScope(harAddress, HAR_VIEW_HEIGHT));
		proxy.disposeProxy();
	});

If HAR file is successfully saved in a shared httpd folder, we’ll use Allure annotations to perform custom html attachment.

@Attachment(value = "{0}", type = "text/html")
public static byte[] attachHtml(String name, String templateName, Map args) {
	String outName = "target" + File.separator + "attachment" + COUNTER.incrementAndGet();
	try {
		execute(templateName, outName, args);
		return toByteArray(new File(outName));
	} catch (Exception ignored) {
		return new byte[0];
	}
}

That’s pretty much it. docker-selenium-samples contains extensive examples working with proxy / video recording in Docker containers.

And here’s produced output demo: