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 -screen 0 1024x768x24 2>&1 >/dev/null &  $DISPLAY=:1 java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.0b3.jar 05:08:31.227 INFO - Java: Sun Microsystems Inc. 19.0-b09 05:08:31.229 INFO - OS: Linux 2.6.32-305-ec2 i386 05:08:31.233 INFO - v2.0 [b3], with Core v2.0 [b3] 05:08:32.121 INFO - RemoteWebDriver instances should connect to: http://127.0.0.1:4444/wd/hub 05:08:32.122 INFO - Version Jetty/5.1.x 05:08:32.123 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server/driver,/selenium-server/driver] 05:08:32.124 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server,/selenium-server] 05:08:32.124 INFO - Started HttpContext[/,/] 05:08:32.291 INFO - Started org.openqa.jetty.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler@1186fab 05:08:32.292 INFO - Started HttpContext[/wd,/wd] 05:08:32.295 INFO - Started SocketListener on 0.0.0.0:4444 05:08:32.295 INFO - Started org.openqa.jetty.jetty.Server@1ffb8dc 

Great, everything should work now, right?

When I run my code:

from selenium import webdriver from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys  browser = webdriver.Firefox()  browser.get("http://www.yahoo.com")  

I get this:

Error: cannot open display: :0 

Answer 1

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.