Selenium webdriver in python: Re-using same web browser across testcases

python, selenium, unit-testing, webdriver

Solution

You could try creating another module (I usually use pkg.__init__ for such things) and in there put a function that returns the selenium driver. Return the cached one if already exists, of course. Eg. in mypkg/__init__.py

from selenium import webdriver

DRIVER = None

def getOrCreateWebdriver():
    global DRIVER
    DRIVER = DRIVER or webdriver.Firefox()
    return DRIVER

And call from your tests with:

import mypkg
...
class testcaseA(unittest.TestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        self.driver = mypkg.getOrCreateWebdriver()

Problem

Python newb here. I'm trying to re-use same browser throughout my testcases. However, I cannot figure out how to pass global variable to make this work. Currently, I have a main.py that looks like this #!C:/Python27/python.exe ``` import unittest import unittest, time, re, HTMLTestRunner, cgi import os, sys, inspect from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import Select from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException global DRIVER DRIVER = webdriver.Firefox() # Make all subfolders available for importing cmd_folder = os.path.realpath(os.path.abspath(os.path.split(inspect.getfile( inspect.currentframe() ))[0])) if cmd_folder not in sys.path: sys.path.insert(0, cmd_folder) # Import test cases from setup.testcaseA import * from setup.testcaseB import * # serialize the testcases (grouping testcases) suite = unittest.TestSuite() # setup new test suite suite.addTest(unittest.makeSuite(testcaseA)) suite.addTest(unittest.makeSuite(testcaseB)) runner = HTMLTestRunner.HTMLTestRunner() print "Content-Type: text/html\n" # header is required for displaying the website runner.run(suite) ``` And I have testcaseA.py file in setup/ folder that looks like this: ``` from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import Select from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException import unittest, time, re, cgi class testcaseA(unittest.TestCase): def setUp(self): #get global driver variable <- DOESNT WORK! self.driver = DRIVER def testcaseA(self): driver = self.driver #Bunch of tests def tearDown(self): #self.driver.quit() <- Commented out, because I want to continue re-using the browser ``` testcaseB.py is basically identical to testcaseA.py When I run main.py, I get an error: ft1.1: Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\test\setup\testcaseA.py", line 10, in setUp self.driver = DRIVER #get global driver variable NameError: global name 'DRIVER' is not defined Any suggestions? Thanks!

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