Is there a Windows equivalent to PyVirtualDisplay

Question

I have written a web scraper for a mate to save him time at work. It is written in Python, using Selenium and opening a Firefox browser.

I have written this code myself on a Linux machine I use PyVirtualDisplay so Firefox doesn't actually open and disturb my work.

How can I make it run within a virtual display on a Windows PC?

Answer 1

The reason you can not run PyVirtualDisplay on Windows is that PyVirtualDisplay uses Xvfb as it's display and Xvfb is a headless display server for the X Window System, Windows does not use the X Window System.

not recommended

So... what you can do if you insist on working with PyVirtualDisplay is to change the Display(visible=True) Or you can set the backend as is shown in the API here.

My recommendation

Don't use PyVirtualDisplay you can use any webdriver such as Chrome driver and just add ChromeOptions with --headless.

Or in your case you use firefox so it would look something like:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options

options = Options()
options.add_argument("--headless")
driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_options=options, executable_path="C:\\Utility\\BrowserDrivers\\geckodriver.exe")
print("Firefox Headless Browser Invoked")
driver.get('http://google.com/')
driver.quit()

For more updated info just have a look here.

Hope this helps you!