Selenium testing without browser

Question

I use Selenium RC for testing. Now to perform a load test, I want to run parallel test cases. Is there any way to run them without opening a browser?

Answer 1

You can run Selenium headless, take a look at this question/answer: Is it possible to hide the browser in Selenium RC?

Especially for performance load tests, you should have a look at Apache JMeter.

Answer 2

Yes. 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 switch back to Firefox again:

if os.getenv("environment") == "production":
    driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()
else:
    driver = webdriver.Firefox()

Answer 3

Always follow the Documentation. Here is what selenium doc says. It provide a standalone jar.

• Download the standalone jar. And run it with command

  java -jar selenium-server-standalone.jar
  

• Now you will see a stanalone server started.

• Now set up your webdriver like below and rest part will be as it is.

  driver = webdriver.Remote(command_executor='http://127.0.0.1:4444/wd/hub', desired_capabilities={'browserName': 'htmlunit', 'version': '2', 'javascriptEnabled': True})
  

• Summary code will be like.

  from selenium import webdriver
  from selenium.webdriver.common.desired_capabilities import DesiredCapabilities
  from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
  driver = webdriver.Remote(command_executor='http://127.0.0.1:4444/wd/hub', 
  desired_capabilities={'browserName': 'htmlunit', 'version': '2', 
  'javascriptEnabled': True})
  driver.get("http://www.python.org")
  assert "Python" in driver.title
  elem = driver.find_element_by_name("q")
  elem.clear()
  elem.send_keys("pycon")
  elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
  assert "No results found." not in driver.page_source
  driver.close()
  

Answer 4

To set up on Centos (do all installation as root)

Install pip Download https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py

python get-pip.py

Installing selenium If you have pip on your system, you can simply install or upgrade the Python bindings: pip install -U selenium

Alternately, you can download the source distribution from PyPI (e.g. selenium-2.53.1.tar.gz), unarchive it, and run:

python setup.py install

install the program: pyvirtualdisplay

pip install pyvirtualdisplay

yum install Xvfb libXfont Xorg

Then modify your script to add the bold lines within ** and **

**from pyvirtualdisplay import Display**
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import Select
from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException
from selenium.common.exceptions import NoAlertPresentException
import unittest, time, re

class SeleniumDemo(unittest.TestCase):

def setUp(self):
    **self.display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
    self.display.start()**
    self.driver = webdriver.Firefox()
    self.driver.implicitly_wait(30)
    self.base_url = "http://www.soastastore.com/"
    self.verificationErrors = []
    self.accept_next_alert = True
……
def tearDown(self):`enter code here`
    self.driver.quit()
    ***self.display.stop()***
    self.assertEqual([], self.verificationErrors)