WebDriver playback in Selenium IDE requires the Standalone Selenium Server. The Standalone Selenium Server in turn requires a few supporting pieces of software. I have decided to break the whole process into individual parts to make it easier on the eyes. So onwards to the second step of getting the Standalone Selenium Server.

Getting Standalone Selenium Server

This post deals with installing the Standalone Selenium Server. It is a piece of cake – really simple. All you have to do is download the jar file. Really that’s it.

Download the jar file from Selenium downloads page

Go to the Selenium download page and download the file that starts with selenium-server-standalone. As of writing it is selenium-server-standalone-2.28.0.jar. It is a good thing to periodically get the latest version as it contains support for the latest versions of browsers. I would also recommend putting the jar file in its own folder. I have very creatively called mine selenium-servers.

Checking if it works

To start the server you need to have Java installed. If you have not done it yet, check my earlier post. If you have Java, open a command prompt or terminal window and change to the folder where you have downloaded the jar file. Then start the selenium server with the following command.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.28.0.jar

The selenium-server-standalone-2.28.0.jar should be changed to the name of the jar file you have downloaded. If all went well you should see a bunch of messages including one like the following.

INFO: Launching a standalone server

If you see this message, all is fine and you can shut down the server by pressing ctrl+c on Windows or closing the command window. If not, then probably Java was not installed correctly or the downloaded file was corrupted.

You should now be ready to go to the next step which is getting the Internet Explorer Driver Server.