To run Selenium tests against Internet Explorer, does Selenium-RC itself have to be on a WIndows server?

I hope this is not a totally dumb question. I have a web application running on a Linux server, and I am working on a Linux development machine. We want to set up Selenium testing of the web application. I have started to generate test scripts, in HTML format initially, on my dev box using FireFox+Se-IDE. I am happy with exporting these scripts to Perl to make a test suite which will run using Test::WWW:Selenium.

But to t开发者_JAVA百科est how the app behaves in IE, presumably I need to have an IE browser executable that can be fired up by the Se-RC process. The Perl WWW::Selenium docs talk about starting a server typically on localhost:4444, for a browser "*firefox", "*iexplore", etc: where citing "*iexplore" causes the RC to search for a browser named iexplore.exe.

Does this mean that I will have to install the Se-RC on a Windows server in order to be able to exercise an 'actual' IE browser? And if I want to also test against Safari on the Mac platform, do I need to install the Selenium RC on a MAc also?

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Yes, you need to run the Se-RC server on the same platform that you want to test (so to test IE, you'll need to have a Se-RC server running on a Windows machine). However, the Se-RC server doesn't have to be on the same machine as the test code that you are executing. The localhost:4444 information you mention could be changed to any arbitrary host and port number. So you could execute your Perl script on a Linux server and point your IE tests to another machine running Windows and Se-RC server.

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From what I can recall, the browser you want to run the tests in must be installed on the server, so yes.

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NO, Selenium RC itself means Remote Control, hence RC server can be started anywhere. You have to go for iexplorerRemoteDriver for this situation.