Unintelligible

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Installing Selenium-RC as a Windows service

Installing Selenium as a Windows service is reasonably straightforward - based on the instructions for Fitnesse, which unfortunately seem to have been deleted from the Fitnesse wiki, but which have been reproduced here.

There are two parts to doing this - the first, registering the service using srvany.exe (which wraps any executable as a service), and the second, adding the keys to the registry to tell srvany.exe how to launch Selenium-RC. srvany.exe is a part of the Windows Resource Kit, if you don’t have it already you will need to download it from Microsoft.

The following will register the Selenium service - on the command line (all in one line):

"C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\instsrv.exe" SeleniumRC
"C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\srvany.exe" -a [myuser] -p [mypass]

This is assuming the Windows Resource Kit has been installed to its default location, “C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits”. Also, note that the user supplied needs to have the Log On As Service permissions assigned.

Now, add the following keys to the registry - this text can simply be copied-and-pasted to a .reg file, then double-clicked to add the entries to the registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SeleniumRC\Parameters]
"Application"="java.exe"
"AppDirectory"="C:\\Program Files\\selenium-server-1.0.1"
"AppParameters"="-Xrs -jar selenium-server.jar"

You should now be able to start the service - if you get an error about the service failing to start due to a logon issue, make sure that the user you are using to run the service has been granted Log On As A Service permission (editing the service logon credentials in the Services MMC snap-in and saving the changes will cause this to happen automatically.)

posted by Nick at 10:08 pm - filed in testing, windows