Is it possible to run selenium (Firefox) web drive

问题:

We are considering upgrading our production server from Ubuntu-desktop 10.04 to Ubuntu-server 12.04.

We have various services running on our current desktop OS such as Selenium Web Driver. My question is can the Selenium Web Driver be run from a cli-based system?

My immediate thought is that it can't, because it relies on Firefox, but I'd like for someone to prove me wrong!

回答1:

What you're looking for is a headless-browser.

Yes, it's possible to run Selenium on Firefox headlessly. Here is a post you can follow.

Here is the summary steps to set up Xvfb

#install Xvfb
sudo apt-get install xvfb

#set display number to :99
Xvfb :99 -ac &
export DISPLAY=:99    

#you are now having an X display by Xvfb

回答2:

I easily managed to hide the browser window.

Just install PhantomJS. Then, change this line:

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

to:

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()

The rest of your code won't need to be changed and no browser will open. For debugging purposes, use driver.save_screenshot('screen.png') at different steps of your code or just keep using the Firefox webdriver in development.

回答3:

If you want headless browser support then there is another approach you might adopt.

https://github.com/detro/ghostdriver

It was announced during Selenium Conference and it is still in development. It uses PhantomJS as the browser and is much better than HTMLUnitDriver, there are no screenshots yet, but as it is still in active development.

回答4:

Yes. You can use HTMLUnitDriver instead for FirefoxDriver while starting webdriver. This is headless browser setup. Details can be found here.

回答5:

An optional is to use pyvirtualdisplay like this:

from pyvirtualdisplay import Display

display = Display(visible=0, size=[800, 600])
display.start()

#do selenium job here

display.close()

A shorter version is:

with Display() as display:
    # selenium job here

This is generally a python encapsulate of xvfb, and more convinient somehow.

By the way, although PhantomJS is a headless browser and no window will be open if you use it, it seems that PhantomJS still needs a gui environment to work.

I got Error Code -6 when I use PhantomJS() instead of Firefox() in headless mode (putty-connected console). However everything is ok in desktop environment.

回答6:

UPDATE: You do not need XVFB to run headless Firefox anymore. Firefox v55+ on Linux and Firefox v56+ on Windows/Mac now supports headless execution.

I added some how-to-use documentation here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Headless_mode#Selenium_in_Java

回答7:

Another option is GhostDriver which is now officially supported by WebDriver: Ghostdriver actual performance gain

回答8:

Be aware that HtmlUnitDriver webclient is single-threaded and Ghostdriver is only at 40% of the functionalities to be a WebDriver.

Nonetheless, Ghostdriver run properly for tests and I have problems to connect it to the WebDriver hub.

回答9:

Yes, you can run test scripts without a browser, But you should run them in headless mode.