Is it possible to hide the browser in Selenium RC?

Question

I am using Selenium RC to automate some browser operations but I want the browser to be invisible. Is this possible? How? What about Selenium Grid? Can I hide the Selenium RC window also?

Answer 1

There are a few options:

• You could use Selenium Grid so that the browser is opened on a completely different machine (or virtual machine) that you can then connect to via VNC or Remote Desktop Connection if you wanted to see the browser. Also, another option: if you run a Jenkins foreground process on that remote server, it can execute your test project on the desktop.

• You can run Selenium 'headless' on Linux in XVFB. I've never tried doing this and doubt it's really worth the effort. http://www.alittlemadness.com/2008/03/05/running-selenium-headless/

• You can wrap Selenium RC in a Windows service. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/137890 . Except that permissions constraints on later versions of windows will probably prevent Selenium from accessing the desktop like Windows 2000 used to allow us to do.

• Another option would be to use something like WebDriver HTMLUnitDriver, which doesn't launch a 'real' browser. http://code.google.com/p/webdriver/ . Also there is a PhantomJS option as well as a 'headless Chrome' that you could use.

• Of course there's also the option of using a service like SauceLabs, where you can get your tests to be run in the cloud. After your tests have completed you can watch a video of them running.

Answer 2

On Linux, you can run WebDriver in a headless (virtual) display to hide the browser. This can be done with Xvfb (X virtual framebuffer).

You can control Xvfb directly from Python code using xvfbwrapper: https://github.com/cgoldberg/xvfbwrapper

Python code for running headless would look like this:

from selenium import webdriver from xvfbwrapper import Xvfb  display = Xvfb() display.start()  # now Firefox will run in a virtual display.  # you will not see the browser. driver = webdriver.Firefox() driver.get('http://www.google.com')  print(driver.title) driver.quit()  display.stop() 

Install dependencies on Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install xvfb $ pip install xvfbwrapper