selenium server

Question

Python

Hello, I worked with Seleinum for a long time and started a server (jar application). Now again we need automation of testing the site, I work with python, I installed the selenium module via pip.

browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get("http://www.yahoo.com")
elem = browser.find_element_by_name("p")

This code is fully working, the browser is launched. Now I’m sitting and I can’t understand, why the server? As far as I remember, it was used to translate commands to the browser from different EPs, but if everything works like that.

Answer 1

somehow I worked with Seleinum for a long time and started the server (jar-application)
Once upon a time there was only such a server, yes.
Now there is a new option - web drivers for different browsers.
They do not require any server. And they have a new API - version 2.

Answer 2

If you need to: -
run tests remotely on different machines with different operating systems and browsers, -
organize a test bench to run a large number of tests,
you need Selenium Server - it can receive commands from a remote machine where the automation script is running, and execute them in browser. Several Selenium servers can form a distributed network called Selenium Grid, which makes it easy to scale the automation bench.