Is there a difference between agents with JDK capability and agents with builder capability in bamboo ?

Question

I am trying to run selenium tests as part of a bamboo build configured in a windows machine. It throws 'Unable to launch browser ' exception when it is run using an agent with both JDK and builder capabilities. When I tried running it using an agent only with JDK capability, it runs fine. Is there a difference between agents with JDK and builder capability in bamboo ?

Annie James · Answer

Thanks for your response. The bamboo build (Versions 3.0.1) is just configured with local agents having shared builder and jdk capabilities. Will they run as service by default ? If so how do we configure them in bamboo to run interact with desktop ? Sorry, I am new to Bamboo and I couldnt get much info from the Bamboo docs on this.

Joe Clark · Answer

This is not directly related to your questions, but I've found a common cause of being unable to launch Selenium from a Windows bamboo agent is because the agent is configured to run as a Windows service.  In modern versions of Windows (ie. anything newer than Windows 2000) any process that runs as a service is prohibited from interacting with the desktop by default.

Windows services are unable to launch a browser window (as required by Selenium) because it cannot communicate with the Windowing API.

To get around this, you either need to run Bamboo from a logged-on user session, or configure the service to allow interaction with the desktop.

If you've already ensured this is correct, or you're not running your agent as a service, I apologise for the old info. :-)