How do I run Selenium in Xvfb?

Question

I\'m on EC2 instance. So there is no GUI.

$pip install selenium
$sudo apt-get install firefox xvfb

Then I do this:

$Xvfb :1         


        

Answer 1

You can use PyVirtualDisplay (a Python wrapper for Xvfb) to run headless WebDriver tests.

#!/usr/bin/env python

from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
from selenium import webdriver

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

# now Firefox will run in a virtual display. 
# you will not see the browser.
browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('http://www.google.com')
print browser.title
browser.quit()

display.stop()

more info

---

You can also use xvfbwrapper, which is a similar module (but has no external dependencies):

from xvfbwrapper import Xvfb

vdisplay = Xvfb()
vdisplay.start()

# launch stuff inside virtual display here

vdisplay.stop()

or better yet, use it as a context manager:

from xvfbwrapper import Xvfb

with Xvfb() as xvfb:
    # launch stuff inside virtual display here.
    # It starts/stops in this code block.