selenium webdriver.Firefox 无法为非 sudo 用户启动

Question

I have a python method that sets up a browser in headless-mode on a linux server for website scraping with selenium. The display gets setup perfectly fine regardless of which user executes the python script but if the sudo user doesn't execute the script it will hang at the webdriver.Firefox() setup line indefinitely.

Here is the full method:

def browserSetup(self, browser=None):
    try:
        # now Firefox will run in a virtual display. you will not see the browser.  
        self.display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
        self.display.start()

        if self.verbose:
            print "Virtual display started for browser instantiation."

        #change user agent
        profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
        profile.set_preference("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_4) AppleWebKit/536.30.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.5 Safari/536.30.1")
        profile.set_preference("webdriver.log.file", "webdriver.log")

        # Create a new instance of the Firefox driver
        browser = webdriver.Firefox(profile)

        if self.verbose:
            print "Browser window object established @ %s." % browser

        return browser
    except Exception, e:
        raise e

So, to repeat my issue: if the script is not executed as sudo then the script will hang indefinitely at the webdriver.Firefox creation line. Why would this be happening?

UPDATE: The problem is this line here:

 browser = webdriver.Firefox() #with or without the profile variable - the results are the same

UPDATE AGAIN Several people in the comments below have suggested I try running Firefox from the command line manually to see if there are any issues; here are the results:

#initialize the virtual display
$ sudo Xvfb :10 -extension RANDR
[dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic, removing from list!
[dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled, removing from list!
[dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled, removing from list!
[dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1, removing from list!
[dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi, removing from list!
[dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi, removing from list!
[dix] Could not init font path element /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType, removing from list!

#now start firefox in another ssh window (since the Xvfb process is consuming my prompt)
$ export DISPLAY=:10
$ firefox

(firefox:6347): GConf-WARNING **: Client failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon:
//bin/dbus-launch terminated abnormally without any error message

The last error message displays hundreds of times...

Answer 1

I can only guess, but here's what I suspect.

sudo clears your environment variables when you start Firefox via it. That includes the DISPLAY variable as well.

Two ways to disable this behavior: - Disable env_reset in your sudoers configuration. - Use sudo -i , that will preserve the value of DISPLAY .

Answer 2

First you need to start the Xvfb (virtual frame-buffer X server) in the background.

For example, $ sudo Xvfb :1 & or $ sudo Xvfb :1 -screen 0 1280x1024x8 .

Then, whenever you want to run your script, do it with the DISPLAY environment variable set accordingly.

For example, $ DISPLAY=:1 python your_script.py .

Answer 3

You may not want to open usr/lib up for good but try testing it with open perms on the directory.

sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib

If that's the issue, you can always move the drivers inside your application. Unless you're sharing them with many people, they're small enough to have several copies.

Answer 4

For anyone else like me that until today could be having this problem: For me was due to Firefox needs to be able to create a profile, which is created at the user home folder. The user i created didn't had its own user home folder so when i created it the problem was solved.