Setting up Selenium Grid on Windows 2008 as a service

Doing this was such a pain in the ass that I thought I should blog about it just in case somebody else on the internet runs into the same situation.

Doing google searches yields these results:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1617458/how-to-create-windows-service-from-java-jar
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1617458/how-to-create-windows-service-from-java-jar

etc…

But most of the solutions don’t really offer a step by step solution, they only provide you with the tool. I found these tools confusing or maybe I’m just too stupid so I gave up using them. Instead I came up with my own solution.

Our server is running windows 2008 and in the past I had used srvany.exe as part of the Windows Resource Kit to manage services. However, this kit is only limited to windows 2003. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent kit for 2008 (as of this post).

But after googling around I discovered that all you had to do is copy the exe from windows resource kit and it should work.

So that’s exactly what I did!

Here is a step by step guide on how to setup Selenium Grid as a Windows 2008 service.

1. Download Selenium Server (http://seleniumhq.org/download/)
2. Fetch srvany.exe from a 2003 server with the resource kit installed or try and find it online.
3. For my setup I moved everything to D:\Selenium but you can use another directory
4. Open up cmd
5. Type “sc create SeleniumHub binPath= “D:\Selenium\srvany.exe”  to create the service
6. Open up regedit
7. Navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\SeleniumHub”
8. Create the following keys/strings
   
9. Start the service!

If you want to setup a Selenium Grid node do the same thing.