Testing GUI applications

Overview

In order to perform UI testing your applications on DEV@cloud, you may need to have an X11 windowing server installed.

There are several ways to acquire this X11 display

• the Xvnc plugin - https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Xvnc+Plugin
• use a virtual framebuffer - Xvfb

DEV@cloud support

DEV@cloud supports the second of these options directly using the Xvfb application.

Xvfb is deployed into the build executors and just needs to be started to be available for your application.

Starting Xvfb

Using with multiple build steps

If your job is configured with multiple build steps, you need to propagate the DISPLAY env variable to all steps. The simpler way is to use the setEnv plugin to define DISPLAY for the whole build. 

For maven 2/3 jobs, you'll need the m2 extra steps plugin to start Xvfb as a pre-build step.

Troubleshooting

If you get an error similar to the following it means that you haven't started Xvfb properly.