What Is Zalenium? Setup, Features & TestMu AI Cloud Integration

What Is Zalenium?

Zalando introduced an open source Docker-based Selenium Grid framework to quickly build up in-house Selenium Grid that is especially useful in testing test your locally hosted web pages. This open source project came to be known as Zalenium. Being open-source, Zalenium emerged as a favorite for many developers and testers worldwide. Wondering why? Well, to understand that you may need to have a look at everything offered by Zalenium.

What Does Zalenium Offer?

Using the docker-Selenium approach, Zalenium helps you in building an inhouse on-cloud Selenium Grid infrastructure with latest browsers & up-to-date driver versions. It also offers capabilities for every browser & platform to help you focus on writing better automation code at a faster pace. But wait, there is more!

• Zalenium provides an intuitive dashboard to help you analyze the logs of your Selenium script execution.
• You also get live previews of your Selenium script execution on their disposable Selenium Grid.

• Use custom capabilities to perform cross browser testing & responsive testing on screen resolution & time-zone of your own choice.

• You can also record video of your Selenium test sessions for reviewing & debugging.
• On the security front, every Zalenium Grid you get on cloud is provided by basic authentication.

Is Zalenium Deprecated? Current Status and Selenium Grid 4

Before setting up Zalenium, it is important to know where the project stands today. Zalenium is officially archived and no longer actively developed. Its final release is version 3.141.59z, which pins it to an old Selenium 3 line, so it does not support Selenium 4 features and receives no new updates or security fixes.

The good news is that Zalenium's most-loved capabilities did not disappear. They were absorbed upstream into Selenium Grid 4:

• Dynamic container scaling: Grid 4 can spin browser containers up and down on demand, the feature Zalenium was best known for.
• Video recording: session video recording is available in Grid 4's Docker setup.
• Live session view and dashboards: Grid 4 ships its own Grid UI for monitoring running sessions.

For anyone researching Zalenium today, the practical takeaway is simple: use Zalenium only if you are maintaining a legacy setup, and plan to move to Selenium Grid 4 or a managed cloud grid for anything new.

Step-by-Step: How to Set Up and Run Zalenium With Docker

If you still need to run legacy Zalenium, it ships as a Docker image, so the setup is short. The only prerequisite is a working Docker installation. First, pull the Zalenium image:

docker pull dosel/zalenium

You also need the Selenium node image that Zalenium launches, after which you can start the grid:

# Pull the browser node image Zalenium uses
docker pull elgalu/selenium

# Start Zalenium
docker run --rm -ti --name zalenium -p 4444:4444 \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  dosel/zalenium start \
  --desiredContainers 2 \
  --maxDockerSeleniumContainers 8

Two flags do most of the work: --desiredContainers sets how many idle browser containers to keep warm and ready, and --maxDockerSeleniumContainers caps how far Zalenium will scale up under load. Once it is running, point your Selenium tests at the grid endpoint at http://localhost:4444/wd/hub.

How Zalenium Handles Cloud Integration and Scaling

One of Zalenium's most useful features is Integrated Cloud Testing. When your local Docker resources run out, or when a test asks for a browser or OS combination your local grid cannot provide, Zalenium can automatically redirect that session to a cloud provider instead of failing.

This is exactly where a cloud grid like TestMu AI fits in. By configuring TestMu AI as the cloud endpoint, Zalenium falls back to the cloud for extra capacity and for legacy or hard-to-maintain browser and OS combinations, so a test run keeps going without you provisioning more local containers. In practice, teams use local Docker containers for everyday runs and burst to the cloud grid for scale and coverage, the same benefit you get by pointing your Selenium tests straight at the TestMu AI grid of thousands of real browsers and devices.

How Will TestMu AI Integration To Zalenium Help You?

By far, we know how cool Zalenium Grid can be! But how does the integration with TestMu AI help you? If you are not aware of TestMu AI, well, we provide a cloud-based testing platform for browser compatibility testing across 3,000+ real browsers through a Selenium automation.

You may be wondering that if both TestMu AI & Zalenium are providing a Selenium Grid at scale then what will you gain by integrating these two?

Well, Zalenium offers a docker-selenium Grid for local page testing. This means that if you wish to perform cross browser testing through Zalenium Grid then you would only be able to test on browsers installed in your particular machine. Scaling up or down new infrastructure would be at a considerable cost, and will require a lot of effort from your DevOps teams. And then there are also issues related to maintenance, security, firewalls, updates, patches, etc. All in all a hell lot of work, which you won't have to do with TestMu AI.

Let's take a few use cases to get a better picture. What happens if you wish to test for legacy browser versions? What would you do if you own a Linux OS & wish to test on Windows, or macOS or vice-versa? If you went on installing every browser version one after another as you test, then you can be pretty certain that your release dates are going to creep in a lot sooner before you can cover a sufficient test coverage for cross browser testing. This is where TestMu AI integration with Zalenium comes into play.

TestMu AI integration with Zalenium will allow you to perform automated cross browser testing over 3,000+ real browsers, browser versions running on different devices in the cloud. So you can avoid the hassle of maintaining your own test environments as we will host them for you using our cloud servers.

All you have to do is specify TestMu AI environment variables & Hub URL into your Zalenium docker. Here is an example of that.

export LT_USERNAME=
    export LT_ACCESS_KEY=
    export LT_URL= # default value is "https://hub.lambdatest.com"
    docker run --rm -ti --name zalenium -p 4444:4444       -e LT_USERNAME -e LT_ACCESS_KEY -e LT_URL       -v /tmp/videos:/home/seluser/videos       -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock       --privileged dosel/zalenium start --lambdaTestEnabled true

TestMu AI integration with Zalenium not only offers you a flexible, disposable, Selenium Grid, it also offers a library of browsers, browser versions, operating systems. The best part?

You can do all of this on-cloud, without worrying about the hassle of maintenance of Selenium Grid for different browsers & different operating system too.

TestMu AI also offers integrations with third-party tools for CI/CD, project management, and more.

Watch Out! We Got More Incoming!

We are rigorously working to expand TestMu AI as a testing platform that fulfills all your testing requirements. We will be coming with more exciting product updates, so stay tuned!

We hope you like our latest integration with Zalenium. Do give it a spin & let us know your thoughts in the comment section below. We would love to hear any suggestions from you. In case you are looking for an integration that we don't currently offer, then drop us an email to support@testmuai.com or you could simply give us a shout. We are here to help you speed your test suites 24/7. Happy Testing! 🙂