Running headless Selenium browser tests on PythonAnywhere with Xvfb
You can now run Selenium tests from PythonAnywhere, using a virtual display.
PythonAnywhere, for those that don’t know, is our attempt at a fully browser-based Python development environment. So that includes an editor, consoles to actually run your scripts, and a web hosting platform too… But until now, it hasn’t been perfect for the Best Form of Development(TM), namely test-driven development, TDD.
Being an XP shop, we’re very keen on TDD and functional testing, for which we use Selenium to drive a real web browser, and check the actual behaviour of our site. Until now we’ve not been able to “dogfood” our selenium tests and run them from PythonAnywhere itself, because opening up a real web browser tends to mean needing a real display, something our servers don’t have.
But a solution exists! Even “headless” servers can use a virtual display like Xvfb to spoof apps like Firefox into running, even if there’s no real screen for them to actually be displayed on. Inspired by this post, we’ve now added the binaries for Xvfb and Firefox (well, iceweasel actually) to our servers, as well as the excellent pyVirtualDisplay module, so running selenium tests on PythonAnywhere is now as easy as this:
from pyvirtualdisplay import Display from selenium import webdriver display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600)) display.start() # we can now start Firefox and it will run inside the virtual display browser = webdriver.Firefox() browser.get('http://www.google.com') print browser.title #this should print "Google" #tidy-up browser.quit() display.stop() # ignore any output from this.
(Code shamelessly stolen from Corey Goldberg)
Give it a go! And if you need some inspiration for what kind of tests to run, I can recommend an excellent TDD/Django/Selenium tutorial ;-)
New Features, PythonAnywhere, Testing | harry | 
24 April 2012 12:42 pm
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By david karapetyan, 1 July 2012 @ 4:22 am
This is pretty nice. Any chance you guys will add phantomjs and casperjs to the mix. Python is nice and all but sometimes a guy needs to use javascript.