How to use Selenium Webdriver on Heroku?

Question

I am developing a Node.js app, and I use Selenium Webdriver on it for scraping purposes. However, when I deploy on Heroku, Selenium doesn't work. How can I make Selenium work on Heroku?

Answer 1

I was able to get the Selenium Webdriver working on Node/Heroku using PhantomJs as the headless browser. I installed the PhantomJs buildpack to my Heroku app and it just worked. I struggled to get Chrome and Firefox drivers working on Heroku... I wrote a blog with the steps and code I used to get it working:

http://www.viderman.com/2017/05/selenium-on-heroku.html

Answer 2

Below is a javaScript sample code using selenium-webdriver npm package with chrome browser.

const webdriver = require('selenium-webdriver');
const chrome = require('selenium-webdriver/chrome');

let options = new chrome.Options();
//Below arguments are critical for Heroku deployment
options.addArguments("--headless");
options.addArguments("--disable-gpu");
options.addArguments("--no-sandbox");

let driver = new webdriver.Builder()
  .forBrowser('chrome')
  .setChromeOptions(options)
  .build();

driver.get('http://www.google.com');
driver.quit();

Before you are ready to deploy, you would need to add two buildpacks to Heroku.

• Using Heroku buildpacks command:

$ heroku buildpacks:add --index 1 https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-chromedriver
$ heroku buildpacks:add --index 2 https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-google-chrome

or

• Config in Heroku dashboard:
  Settings -> Add buildpacks -> https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-chromedriver -> Save changes
  Settings -> Add buildpacks -> https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-google-chrome -> Save changes