Selenium testing without browser

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?

Chrome now has a headless mode:

op = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
op.add_argument('headless')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=op)

You can run Selenium headless, take a look at this question/answer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1418082/selenium-can-i-hide-the-browser

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

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)

Try this code:

op = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
op.add_argument('headless')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=op)

Since PhantomJS has been deprecated, using headless versions of Firefox would be a viable option.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options

options = Options()
options.add_argument("--headless")
driver = webdriver.Firefox(options=options)
driver.get('https://www.google.com/')

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()
  

It is possible, but not with the standard firefox driver / chrome / etc.

You would need to install PhantomJS. Just assign your WebDriver to an instance of phantomJS driver:

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()

If you run your code now, no browser window will be opened.

You can import Options if you don't want to open a web browser.

from selenium import webdriver   # for webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait  # for implicit and explict waits
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options  # for suppressing the browser

Then in the code:

option = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
option.add_argument('headless')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=option)

And continue with the rest of the program.

requirements:

sudo apt-get install xvfb
pip install selenium
pip install PyVirtualDisplay

download chrome driver binary from below link and paste into drivers directory: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads

code:

from selenium import webdriver
from pyvirtualdisplay import Display

with Display(visible=False, size=(800, 600)):
    browser = webdriver.Chrome('drivers/chromedriver')
    browser.get('https://www.example.com')
    print(browser.page_source)
    browser.quit()