I am trying to use selenium from python to scrape some dynamics pages with javascript. However, I cannot call firefox after I followed the instruction of selenium on the pypi page(http://pypi.python.org/pypi/selenium). I installed firefox on AWS ubuntu 12.04. The error message I got is:
In [1]: from selenium import webdriver In [2]: br = webdriver.Firefox() --------------------------------------------------------------------------- WebDriverException Traceback (most recent call last) /home/ubuntu/<ipython-input-2-d6a5d754ea44> in <module>() ----> 1 br = webdriver.Firefox() /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/webdriver.pyc in __init__(self, firefox_profile, firefox_binary, timeout) 49 RemoteWebDriver.__init__(self, 50 command_executor=ExtensionConnection("127.0.0.1", self.profile, ---> 51 self.binary, timeout), 52 desired_capabilities=DesiredCapabilities.FIREFOX) 53 /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/extension_connection.pyc in __init__(self, host, firefox_profile, firefox_binary, timeout) 45 self.profile.add_extension() 46 ---> 47 self.binary.launch_browser(self.profile) 48 _URL = "http://%s:%d/hub" % (HOST, PORT) 49 RemoteConnection.__init__( /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_binary.pyc in launch_browser(self, profile) 42 43 self._start_from_profile_path(self.profile.path) ---> 44 self._wait_until_connectable() 45 46 def kill(self): /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_binary.pyc in _wait_until_connectable(self) 79 raise WebDriverException("The browser appears to have exited " 80 "before we could connect. The output was: %s" % ---> 81 self._get_firefox_output()) 82 if count == 30: 83 self.kill() WebDriverException: Message: 'The browser appears to have exited before we could connect. The output was: Error: no display specifiedn'
I did search on the web and found that this problem happened with other people (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/selenium-users/21sJrOJULZY). But I don’t understand the solution, if it is.
Can anyone help me please? Thanks!
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Answer
The problem is Firefox requires a display. I’ve used pyvirtualdisplay in my example to simulate a display. The solution is:
from pyvirtualdisplay import Display from selenium import webdriver display = Display(visible=False, size=(1024, 768)) display.start() driver= webdriver.Firefox() driver.get("http://www.somewebsite.com/") <---some code---> #driver.close() # Close the current window. driver.quit() # Quit the driver and close every associated window. display.stop()
Please note that pyvirtualdisplay requires one of the following back-ends: Xvfb, Xephyr, Xvnc.
This should resolve your issue.