Running ATF Headless Browser against instances on pre-Rome versions

[Ben Meeder]

Along with the Rome release of ServiceNow, the ATF Headless Browser Docker Image was released to provide customers the ability to automate the running of ATF tests without needing to have a scheduled client test runner manually opened.

However, for many customers, the problem remains that they still cannot automate their ATF tests until they upgrade to Rome. This poses a problem for some customers which will not upgrade for several months. The main purpose of this article is to help bridge that gap. By making several small modifications to the automation script, we can successfully run the ATF Headless Runner against tests in Paris or Quebec instances.

The first change is to disable the "validation page" check, which was created in Rome to validate that the user has proper roles and is logged in successfully. 

The second change is to switch the "heartbeat" from using the custom API created in Rome to instead use the ServiceNow Table API. 

Both changes are successfully implemented on this branch here: https://github.com/bmeeder22/atf-headless-runner/tree/pre-rome-runner

In order to build, run:

docker run -t atf_headless_runner .
echo "<servicenow password>" | docker secret create sn_password -

Finally, you can start the container by running:

python3 start.py <instance_url> <username> headlesschrome

Now, whenever you go to run a Scheduled Suite in ATF with constraints of "Browser Name: Any" and "OS Name: Any" set your tests will execute in the headless environment!