How to run an Effective Suite of Java Selenium Tests — Part 2: Command Line

Running your Selenium JUnit tests via the command line (vanilla & Ant)— the basics

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In a previous article, we looked at running some JUnit Selenium WebDriver tests in the IDE.

In this article, we’ll move away from the IDE and look at how to run Selenium tests from the command line.

Why Command Line?

Running tests via the command line is better than from the IDE because execution is more independent. IDEs allow for customisation, for instance, in the run settings you can set additional environment variables, etc. This is convenient, but can be confusing when you want to run tests on a different machine.

How to Run via the Command Line

There are a few ways to do it, I’ll only go through two methods — directly compiling and running via the command line; and using Apache Ant.

Command Line

To run via the command line, you need to execute two steps:

1. Compile