How do you test web applications? You can use Selenium, but Selenium is very heavy.
I tried wget.
To find out what exactly to send to the app, I started Firebug inside Firefox, went to the “Network” section and recorded what I would do, to see, whether the application works. Then I took the accessed URLs together with the parameters and first tried to send them manually from the command line. Observe, that Firebug lets you copy the exact POST/GET parameter as was sent by the browser, when you right click on the POST/GET command in the Firebug Network log. Once I managed to redo all the steps manuall from the commandline I transferred what I did into a script and edited it until it was nice and would run through:
$ history > test_my_web_app
test_my_web_app now looks as follows:
\#![](/bin/bash
#
# check availability of:
url="http://www.example.org/my-app"
# exit immediately if something goes wrong -> test fails)
set ~~e
echo “Testing \$url”
\# save an error log in case there’s an error so that
\# we can analyse it further
error\_log=\$
cookies=\$
echo “In case the tests fail, you’ll find the error log under \$error\_log”
\# send everything that goes to STDERR to the log
exec 2\>\$error\_log
echo “Getting a cookie…”
wget —save-cookies \$cookies “\$url”~~O /dev/null
1. we could put username/password directly into the script but we’re cautuous and don’t
echo ~~n “please enter user for \$url:”; read user
echo~~n “please enter password for \$url:”; read ~~s pass
echo
echo “Logging in…”
\# if we logged in successfully, then the webapp will send us an html page
\# that contains the following string:
to\_verify=“You’re logged in”
\# POST to the webapp:
wget —load-cookies \$cookies
—post-data “login=Login&user\_login=\$user&user\_password=\$pass”
—save-cookies \$cookies
—keep-session-cookies
“\$url/login”
~~O -
| grep ~~q “\$to\_verify”
\# now we’re logged in
echo “Query component DB…”
\# First search the DB
num\_components\_found=\$
echo “Make sure that the app found something…”
[ \$num\_components\_found~~gt 0 ]
echo “Generate and get picture…”
wget —load-cookies \$cookies
—save-cookies \$cookies
—post-data ‘index=0’
“\$url/get-pic”
-O /dev/null
echo “Hooray, \$url successfully tested”
rm \$error\_log
rm \$cookies
Surprisingly easy, isn’t it?