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?

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.

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

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