Measuring GUI applications

GMT can also measure GUI applications. We only support Linux atm but will update this page once further OS are supported.

Linux #

Wayland and X11 are supported, whereas Wayland is currently accessed through an X11 bridge.

The most typical way GMT is currently used with GUI applications is a browser. Therefore this documentation focuses on Firefox as an example, but it should work with any Linux GUI app.

Firefox example #

We will create a temporary folder in /tmp/my_test and initialize git inside of this folder so that GMT can pick it up.

Create a usage scenario as follows:

usage_scenario.yml

---
name: Sample GMT Firefox headed demo
author: Arne Tarara <[email protected]>
description: Opens Firefox running in a docker container with a GUI window on Ubuntu Linux

services:
  gcb-playwright:
    image: greencoding/gcb_playwright:v12
    volumes:
       - /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix # allows to bind to X11 wayland bridge
    environment:
       DISPLAY: ":0" # Set this to the output of `echo $DISPLAY` on your system
flow:
  - name: Start Firefox via Playwright
    container: gcb-playwright
    commands:
      - type: console
        command: python3 /tmp/repo/test.py

We are using the image of our containerized Playwright Firefox and Chromium. Any GUI app that you have in a container should work though.

As said in the comment the DISPLAY variable should be set to the output of $ echo $DISPLAY in your system. It is typically :0.

Here is also the short boilerplate code of the test.py that we need for this example.

test.py

import sys
import time

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

def main():
    with sync_playwright() as playwright:
        browser = playwright.firefox.launch(headless=False)
        context = browser.new_context()
        page = context.new_page()
        page.goto('https://www.green-coding.io/')
        page.set_default_timeout(240_000) # 240 seconds (timeout is in milliseconds)
        time.sleep(10)
        browser.close()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

As a final step we must allow docker to access the X11 / Wayland connection via: $ xhost +local:docker

The we can run this line:

python3 runner.py --uri /tmp/my_test --name "Testing Firefox GUI" --allow-unsafe

The important part here is the --allow-unsafe switch will allows to properly mount the /tmp/.X11-unix folder, which would otherwise be forbidden.

Now the browser should open and access https://www.green.coding.io

Windows #

Currently not supported

macOS #

Theoretically macOS should be possible if you install X Server on your system. This however is untested.

Let us know if you try it out and it works!

Help / Debugging #

If you run into any errors see the Debugging → page.