Unable to run Firefox in headless mode

Question

I am trying to run a Python + Selenium script in headless mode with Firefox using Xvfb but I am getting errors. There is not much documents or guides available for Xvfb to troubleshoot the issue so looking for assistance here.

Environment info:
OS: CentOS release 6.5 (Minimal installation)
Xvfb: xorg-x11-server-Xvfb-1.15.0
Firefox: 52.8.0
geckodriver: 0.24.0
Python: 3.6.7

Steps followed:

Once done installing the above-mentioned requirements. I started a virtual display with:

$Xvfb :1 -ac &

Also, I tried with:

$Xvfb :1 -screen 0 1024x768x24 -extension RANDR &

And then I set Display variable:

export DISPLAY=:1

When I tried to initiate Selenium WebDriver in Python console I am getting the error Connection refused :

> from selenium import webdriver
> from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
> display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
> display.start()
> driver = webdriver.Firefox()

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/webdriver.py", line 174, in __init__
keep_alive=True)
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 157, in __init__
self.start_session(capabilities, browser_profile)
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 252, in start_session
response = self.execute(Command.NEW_SESSION, parameters)
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 321, in execute
self.error_handler.check_response(response)
File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 242, in check_response
raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: connection refused

Any help or suggestion will be much appreciated.

Answer 1

There is a wrapper around xvfb called PyVirtualDisplay that seems designed for this exact solution. If you simply do a pip install pyvirtualdisplay the following script should run a headless Firefox window:

from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
from selenium import webdriver

display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
display.start()

# now Firefox will run in a virtual display. 
# you will not see the browser.
browser = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path="/Users/username/Location/geckodriver")
browser.get('http://www.google.com')
print browser.title
browser.quit()

display.stop()