Running Headless Selenium with Chrome (opens in new tab)

How does it differ from PhantomJS/CasperJS (headless webkit)? I have been using these for a while and they can do pretty much everything that you can do in a browser.

For all the many problems with X11, it's still pretty cool that you can run something as complicated as Chrome in a headless manner just by running another program (xvfb) that speaks the protocol.

(I keep intending to hack Blink into a state where it can run truly headless, like a library, so that hacks like the above aren't necessary.)

One thing I always think is worth mentioning in posts like this is that the above setup (and any setup using Selenium, really) is going to be super slow. More than one order of magnitude slow, when compared to direct HTTP requests.

It's only ever worth using Selenium when you literally can't do anything else to get your testing done.

Edit: Going through my bookmarks bar and found this, from 2008 - http://www.alittlemadness.com/2008/03/05/running-selenium-he...

Might help anyone if they run into issues.

I've experimented with running headless tests using Firefox, in hopes of getting a good performance boost in terms of test speed. The results actually did not indicate much of a difference. If anything, FF in headless mode on CentOS ran slower than on Windows.

That's not to say there aren't good use cases for running headless browsers with Selenium. One huge benefit is not needing to run Windows VMs.

One odd issue that I ran into was that Chrome (and Firefox) wouldn't always go fullscreen. I had to install a window manager that defaulted to fullscreen. In particular, I went with Ratpoision: http://danielwebb.us/software/ratpoison/

I've had good luck with a similar setup (somewhat inspired by IMVU's) doing integration testing on an Ember app: Chromium + chromedriver inside a VirtualBox Vagrant instance using Xvfb + ratpoison + x11vnc. My tests run from a modified version of Wai Yip Tung's HTMLTestRunner (Python unittest module underneath) so reloading the tests tab in a browser on my dev machine reruns the tests. All of the tests are written in Python. If something gets stuck you open up a VNC client and poke around manually. It's a bit of work to set up and the tests can be a bit slow but I'd recommend it when you really need to test in a browser.