Selenium and Headless Environment

I recently installed Python 2.7, Robot Framework and the Selenium Library (I still don't know if I succeeded though...) on a Red Hat Server to run some test on a web application.

So I tried a simple test case using Robot Framework to see if Selenium Library is functional, just to Open a web page, nothing more...

Selenium Server is up and running accordi开发者_高级运维ng to the result of ps, and Firefox binaries are in the PATH...

Running the test case from the Robot Framework (with the pybot testcasename.tsv) I get an exception:

ERROR: Problem capturing a screenshot to string: java.awt.AWTException: headless environment

So, what is the headless environment? Does anyone have an idea if there is something else that needs to be installed or to be configured as well?

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Using the X Virtual Frame Buffer (Xvfb):

We can use xvfb to create a headless environment for selenium (for example, to run over SSH).

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Instructions:

1. Start xvfb with the following options:

   $ Xvfb :89 -ac -noreset

   (where :89 is the virtual "display" created).

2. Then, set the DISPLAY variable to be this virtual display:

   $ export DISPLAY=:89

3. At this point, we can run the selenium server as desired. Examples follow.

Run the server Java archive:

$ java -jar selenium-server.jar

In Python:

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
...

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Here is a simple Robot library just for that purpose.