Running Firefox with Selenium on Headless Linux for Automated Operations in Python
2015-08-11 11:06 (9 years ago)
ytyng
This is a method to launch Selenium from Python on a headless Linux system.
Prerequisites
$ sudo apt-get install xvfb $ pip install selenium $ pip install pyvirtualdisplay
Instead of a physical display, we use a virtual framebuffer called xvfb.
Pyvirtualdisplay makes it easy to use xvfb from Python.
Python code
from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
from selenium import webdriver
display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
display.start()
fx = webdriver.Firefox()
fx.get("http://example.com")
fx.save_screenshot("/tmp/webdriver-firefox-screenshot.png")
fx.close()
fx.quit()
display.stop()
We open http://example.com with Firefox and save a screenshot.
If the termination process is not handled properly, xvfb and Firefox might become zombie processes. In such cases, you can terminate them using killall.
Check if the processes are still running
$ ps -eafw|grep -i "firefox" $ ps -eafw|grep "xvfb"
Moreover, if you want to develop with a display on a Mac and run without a display on Linux, you can use
import platform use_virtual_display = platform.system() == 'Linux'
By comparing with platform.system(), you can achieve this relatively easily.
The author runs the application development company Cyberneura.
We look forward to discussing your development needs.
We look forward to discussing your development needs.