DEV Community

Mohammad Waseem
Mohammad Waseem

Posted on

Streamlining Test Account Management in Legacy Systems via Web Scraping

#automation #webscraping #legacy #devops

Managing Test Accounts in Legacy Codebases with Web Scraping

In environments where legacy codebases lack modern APIs or automation hooks for managing test accounts, DevOps specialists often face significant challenges. Manual updates or brittle scripts can lead to inconsistency, inefficiency, and errors. This post explores an effective solution: leveraging web scraping techniques to automate the management of test accounts, even in outdated systems.

The Challenge

Legacy applications commonly store user data, including test accounts, within web interfaces or embedded admin dashboards. Without proper API endpoints, updating or rotating test accounts requires manual intervention— a tedious and error-prone process. Automating this through web scraping provides a non-intrusive alternative to interact with the user interface directly.

Why Web Scraping?

Web scraping enables programmatic access to web pages, parsing HTML content, and simulating user interactions, such as form submissions and button clicks. It’s especially useful when the system's backend API is unavailable or insecure to interface with.

Implementation Approach

1. Environment setup

Use Python along with libraries like requests for HTTP sessions and BeautifulSoup for parsing HTML. Selenium can also be employed for complex interactions requiring JavaScript execution.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# Start a session
session = requests.Session()
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

2. Authentication handling

Securely managing login credentials is crucial. Credentials should be stored securely using environment variables or secret managers.

import os
USERNAME = os.environ.get('SYS_ADMIN_USER')
PASSWORD = os.environ.get('SYS_ADMIN_PASS')

login_url = 'https://legacyapp.example.com/login'
payload = {'username': USERNAME, 'password': PASSWORD}

session.post(login_url, data=payload)
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

3. Navigating to the user management interface

Using requests or Selenium, navigate to the page listing test accounts.

response = session.get('https://legacyapp.example.com/test-accounts')
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

4. Parsing and managing accounts

Extract test account data, identify obsolete, or redundant accounts, and prepare update actions.

accounts = soup.find_all('tr', class_='test-account')
for account in accounts:
    account_id = account.get('data-id')
    account_status = account.find('td', class_='status').text
    # Logic for deciding to delete or rotate
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

5. Automating updates

Send POST requests or interact via Selenium to modify test accounts in bulk.

update_url = 'https://legacyapp.example.com/api/update-account'
payload = {'id': account_id, 'status': 'rotated'}
session.post(update_url, data=payload)
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Handling JavaScript-heavy pages

For pages with dynamic content, Selenium offers more control:

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get('https://legacyapp.example.com/test-accounts')
# Perform login, navigate, scrape, or interact
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Final Considerations

  • Always respect the system's terms of service to avoid unintentional abuse.
  • Log actions for auditability and troubleshooting.
  • Incorporate proper error handling and retries.
  • Store credentials securely.

Benefits and Limitations

This approach automates repetitive management tasks, reduces manual errors, and speeds up test environment setup. However, it relies on the stability of the web interface; UI changes can break scraping scripts. Regular maintenance and robust error handling are essential.

By integrating web scraping into your DevOps toolkit, you can significantly improve the management of test accounts in legacy systems, enabling continuous integration and deployment processes even in challenging environments.

🛠️ QA Tip

I rely on TempoMail USA to keep my test environments clean.

Top comments (0)