Running Chrome WebDriver on a linux server with no display - google-chrome

Question

I'd like to run automated tests using selenium2's chrome webdriver on a linux server.
I've already set up firefox to run on the server by using Xvfb (See http://www.semicomplete.com/blog/geekery/xvfb-firefox.html) and would like to do something similar with chrome. Is this possible?

Answer 1

I was facing the same challenge of setting a linux box with selenium + chromedriver,
and here's my notes:
Pre-reqs:
Install JRE to run the selenium jar
Install the selenium server
grab the jar file from https://code.google.com/p/selenium/downloads/list)
Install xvfb (you've seem to have already achieved this part)
Install google-chrome for your linux distribution
Download the chrome driver
You can grab it from here: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads
Install other selenium dependencies that you might need (but the above is the minimum to get chromedriver to work)
To run:
Run xvfb
Xvfb :1 -screen 5 1024x768x8 &
export DISPLAY=:1.5
Run the selenium server jar with ChromeDriver options.
It'll look something like this:
java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.30.0.jar -Dwebdriver.chrome.bin=/path/to/google-chrome -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=/path/to/chromedriver
The selenium server log should output something similar to this:
Mar 19, 2013 10:07:27 AM org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncher main
INFO: Launching a standalone server
Setting system property webdriver.chrome.bin to {location of google-chrome}
Setting system property webdriver.chrome.driver to {location of chromedriver}
10:07:34.258 INFO - RemoteWebDriver instances should connect to: http://127.0.0.1:4444/wd/hub
10:07:34.259 INFO - Version Jetty/5.1.x
10:07:34.259 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server/driver,/selenium-server/driver]
...
Reference:
http://www.yann.com/en/use-xvfb-selenium-and-chrome-to-drive-a-web-browser-in-php-23/08/2012.html
Cheers!

Answer 2

According to SetEnvironmentProperty to ChromeDriver programatically you can do the following:
service = new ChromeDriverService.Builder()
.usingChromeDriverExecutable(new File("/path/to/chromedriver"))
.usingAnyFreePort()
.withEnvironment(ImmutableMap.of("DISPLAY",":20"))
.build();
Here is the documentation for withEnvironment

Answer 3

I haven't been able to find a way to do this programmatically for the ChromeDriver like you can with the FirefoxBinary.
I've submitted a improvement request which has a patch attached to allow this. You can see it here: http://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=2673
Edit:
You can see below response from Stephen on how to use this now the change has been merged.: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16619608/998442

Answer 4

I get what you are trying to do, but you probably just run selenium grid. It was made for automated browser testing. Works great on a server.
https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/en/grid/