How do I run Selenium in Xvfb?

Question

I\'m on EC2 instance. So there is no GUI.

$pip install selenium
$sudo apt-get install firefox xvfb

Then I do this:

$Xvfb :1         


        

Answer 1

This is the setup I use:

Before running the tests, execute:

export DISPLAY=:99
/etc/init.d/xvfb start

And after the tests:

/etc/init.d/xvfb stop

The init.d file I use looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

XVFB=/usr/bin/Xvfb
XVFBARGS="$DISPLAY -ac -screen 0 1024x768x16"
PIDFILE=${HOME}/xvfb_${DISPLAY:1}.pid
case "$1" in
  start)
    echo -n "Starting virtual X frame buffer: Xvfb"
    /sbin/start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --make-pidfile --background --exec $XVFB -- $XVFBARGS
    echo "."
    ;;
  stop)
    echo -n "Stopping virtual X frame buffer: Xvfb"
    /sbin/start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE
    echo "."
    ;;
  restart)
    $0 stop
    $0 start
    ;;
  *)
  echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/xvfb {start|stop|restart}"
  exit 1
esac
exit 0

Answer 2

open a terminal and run this command xhost +. This commands needs to be run every time you restart your machine. If everything works fine may be you can add this to startup commands

Also make sure in your /etc/environment file there is a line

export DISPLAY=:0.0 

And then, run your tests to see if your issue is resolved.

All please note the comment from sardathrion below before using this.

Answer 3

If you use Maven, you can use xvfb-maven-plugin to start xvfb before tests, run them using related DISPLAY environment variable, and stop xvfb after all.

Answer 4

You can use PyVirtualDisplay (a Python wrapper for Xvfb) to run headless WebDriver tests.

#!/usr/bin/env python

from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
from selenium import webdriver

display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
display.start()

# now Firefox will run in a virtual display. 
# you will not see the browser.
browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('http://www.google.com')
print browser.title
browser.quit()

display.stop()

more info

---

You can also use xvfbwrapper, which is a similar module (but has no external dependencies):

from xvfbwrapper import Xvfb

vdisplay = Xvfb()
vdisplay.start()

# launch stuff inside virtual display here

vdisplay.stop()

or better yet, use it as a context manager:

from xvfbwrapper import Xvfb

with Xvfb() as xvfb:
    # launch stuff inside virtual display here.
    # It starts/stops in this code block.

Answer 5

The easiest way is probably to use xvfb-run:

DISPLAY=:1 xvfb-run java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.0b3.jar

xvfb-run does the whole X authority dance for you, give it a try!