Selenium Firefox Webdriver in Java (run parameters)

Question

I've developed a testing unit with Selenium 2 in Java that uses Firefox engine.

The deploy machine has no display so I'm using Xvfb to create it. Unfortunatly that forces me to start java using DISPLAY=:0 java -jar xxx.jar. I've searched selenium javadoc and searched some sources but can't find the method that java uses to launch Firefox, witch is my goal, making java launch firefox using same method DISPLAY=:0 firefox ....

Long story short: I must do DISPLAY=:0 java -jar xxx.jar but I want java to do DISPLAY=:XX firefox ... instead of firefox ... so I can also use multiple displays.

Any advice?

Answer 1

We're actually using Xvfb and Selenium in production with a dozen Firefox instances that work continuously. We use xvfb-run java -jar xxx.jar which select a free display to run all the firefox instances for this program. If screenshot is your concern, you can use only one display and still have a dozen Firefox taking screenshots for different websites at the same time

We wrapped this under a shell script, and that's transparent.

If you really want each selenium server to have its very display, you can overwrite it in the browser string specified in configuration. just make a shell script that do xvfb-run /usr/bin/firefox and pass this script to your config. That should do the trick

Have a good testing