Selenium and Headless Environment

Question

I recently installed Python 2.7, Robot Framework and the Selenium Library (I still don\'t know if I succeeded though...) on a Red Hat Server to run some test on a web applic

Answer 1

Using the X Virtual Frame Buffer (Xvfb):

We can use xvfb to create a headless environment for selenium (for example, to run over SSH).

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Instructions:

1. Start xvfb with the following options:

   $ Xvfb :89 -ac -noreset

   (where :89 is the virtual "display" created).

2. Then, set the DISPLAY variable to be this virtual display:

   $ export DISPLAY=:89

3. At this point, we can run the selenium server as desired. Examples follow.

Run the server Java archive:

$ java -jar selenium-server.jar

In Python:

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
...

Answer 2

Here is a simple Robot library just for that purpose.