Selenium Headless
November 23, 2010
If you try to run selenium-server on a machine without firefox installed, you'll get the following error when running your tests:
$ python bbr.py
E
======================================================================
ERROR: test_bbr (__main__.bbr)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "bbr.py", line 8, in setUp
self.selenium.start()
File "/home/user/Programming/Selenium/bbr/selenium.py", line 189, in start
result = self.get_string("getNewBrowserSession", [self.browserStartCommand, self.browserURL, self.extensionJs])
File "/home/user/Programming/Selenium/bbr/selenium.py", line 219, in get_string
result = self.do_command(verb, args)
File "/home/user/Programming/Selenium/bbr/selenium.py", line 215, in do_command
raise Exception, data
Exception: Failed to start new browser session: java.lang.RuntimeException: Firefox 3 could not be found in the path!
Please add the directory containing ''firefox-bin' or 'firefox'' to your PATH environment
variable, or explicitly specify a path to Firefox 3 like this:
*firefox3/blah/blah/firefox-bin
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 1 test in 1.684s
FAILED (errors=1)
Installing a Browser
I want to run this on a machine without X, running Debian. Firefox is not installed, and not available in the repositories. The recommended replacement is iceweasel:
# apt-get install iceweasel
will install it.
You can now run firefox, though it won't start:
$ firefox Error: no display specified
We can use Xvfb, the X virtual framebuffer. This is a stripped down X server that maintains a virtual display in memory, and doesn't need a real screen. Install it with:
# apt-get install xvfb
We now need to run Xvfb as root:
# Xvfb :99 -ac
99 is the port to use, whilst -ac runs it without access control. (This is probably ok for a private network but beware this on anything else!)
Next, set the DISPLAY environment variable to point to port 99, then run up selenium server:
$ export DISPLAY=:99 $ java -jar selenium-server.jar -firefoxProfileTemplate /home/tjs/.mozilla/firefox/ixtvuw8r.Selenium
Remember if you need to create the firefox profile on a remote headless machine, you can do so using:
$ ssh -X server
This will forward the screen output back to your local computer.
You should now be able to run the tests against the headless server successfully:
$ python bbr.py . ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 1 test in 49.188s OK
