Does Selenium support headless browser testing?

unit-testing selenium selenium-webdriver automated-tests headless-browser
khoomeister picture khoomeister · Sep 27, 2011 · Viewed 53.8k times · Source

I'm looking at Selenium Server at the moment, and I don't seem to notice a driver that supports headless browser testing.

Unless I'm mistaken, it doesn't support it. If you're on X, you can create a virtual framebuffer to hide the browser window, but that's not really a headless browser.

Can anyone enlighten me? Does Selenium support headless browser testing?

Answer

Magenta Nova picture Magenta Nova · Feb 6, 2015

you need not use PhantomJS as an alternative to Selenium. Selenium includes a PhantomJS webdriver class, which rides on the GhostDriver platform. Simply install the PhantomJS binary to your machine. in python, you can then use:

from selenium import webdriver
dr = webdriver.PhantomJS()

and voila.

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