In my work with AllPlayers.com, I have excelled my knowledge of Selenium probably double again. I started with Selenium for all the wrong reasons, but now, I consider myself pretty darn close to an expert. As a result, I was asked to come up with a solution that would implement Selenium on all of our development sandboxes via our configuration management system, Puppet. Now the truth is, I know very little about shell scripting. What I did learn though was invaluable as I built this project I wish to show you all today! However, I'm going to save the shell scripting lesson for another blog post.
What do I need?
Yes there are a few dependencies for this to work. The following list (possibly incomplete) is everything that I can think of off the top of my head:- Java
- Xvfb
- Selenium Server
- Firefox
- Linux
- Headless Selenium Service
How do I install?
Step 1
Download the latest script from my github repository and place the script in/etc/init.d/.
Step 2
Make the directory/usr/lib/headless-selenium.
Step 3
Download Selenium Server and place it in/usr/lib/headless-selenium.
Step 4
Edit the variableSELENIUM_JAR in the service file with the name of the selenium server you downloaded. (At the time I wrote the service the latest was 2.24.1)
Step 5
Create the directores up to/usr/lib/headless-selenium/profiles/firefox
Step 6
Create a selenium profile using firefox. There are several tutorials out there (particularly handy one). I've taken the liberty of creating a default one that you can do what you want to with.Step 7
Put that Profile in/usr/lib/headless-selenium/profiles/firefox/selenium.
Step 8
Start the service!sudo /etc/init.d/headless-selenium start
Usage
sudo /etc/init.d/headless-selenium start
sudo /etc/init.d/headless-selenium stop
sudo /etc/init.d/headless-selenium restart
sudo /etc/init.d/headless-selenium status
Debugging
You may need to debug whether headless selenium is running. The process that is best used is the following:Check service status:
sudo /etc/init.d/headless-selenium status
Headless Selenium should be “running”
Restart service:
sudo /etc/init.d/headless-selenium restart
Get a screenshot of Xvfb
DISPLAY=:42 import -window root screenshot.png
Check for output printed to the logs:
sudo tail -f /var/log/selenium/selenium-output.log
Note: There are several different logs in /var/log/selenium which may be useful.
Check to see if headless selenium is running via a process manager:
ps -ef | grep selenium
ps -ef | grep Xvfb