Does Selenium support headless browser testing?

Question

I\'m looking at Selenium Server at the moment, and I don\'t seem to notice a driver that supports headless browser testing.

Unless I\'m mistaken, it doesn\'t support

Answer 1

Yes. Selenium support headless browser testing and it's more faster as well as convient for big amount of test-cases execution.

ChromeOptions cromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();

//Location of browser binary/.exe file
cromeOptions.setBinary("/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable");

cromeOptions.addArguments("--headless");
cromeOptions.addArguments("--no-sandbox");
cromeOptions.addArguments("--disable-gpu");
cromeOptions.addArguments("--window-size=1920,1080");

WebDriver webDriver = new ChromeDriver(cromeOptions);

Answer 2

Yes Selenium supports headless browser testing.Headless browsers are faster than real time browsers.

Answer 3

The WebDriver API has support for HTMLUnit as the browser for your testing. Ruby people have been using Capybara for a while for their headless selenium testing so it is definitely doable.

Answer 4

Selenium does support headless browser testing in a way. Docker Selenium is maintained by SeleniumHQ. Those docker containers come with xvfb support with them out of the box. There are tools like PhantomJS that you can hook up with Selenium. However, it's not officially supported by Selenium itself.

Much like what others have described, PhantomJS isn't really recommended. The whole point of Selenium is to automate browsers. But why automate a browser no one uses? I never understood how that was overlooked so often by developers..

Answer 5

you need not use PhantomJS as an alternative to Selenium. Selenium includes a PhantomJS webdriver class, which rides on the GhostDriver platform. Simply install the PhantomJS binary to your machine. in python, you can then use:

from selenium import webdriver
dr = webdriver.PhantomJS() 

and voila.

Answer 6

I know this is a old post. Thought it will help others who are looking for an answer.

You can install a full blown firefox in any linux distribution using XVFB. This makes sure your testing is performed in a real browser. Once you have a headless setup, you can use webdriver of your choice to connect and run testing.