I am using Selenium RC to automate some browser operations but I want the browser to be invisible. Is this possible? How? What about Selenium Grid? Can I hide the Selenium RC window also?
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I am using Selenium RC to automate some browser operations but I want the browser to be invisible. Is this possible? How? What about Selenium Grid? Can I hide the Selenium RC window also?
There are a few options:
You could use Selenium Grid so that the browser is opened on a completely different machine (or virtual machine) that you can then connect to via VNC or Remote Desktop Connection if you wanted to see the browser. Also, another option: if you run a Jenkins foreground process on that remote server, it can execute your test project on the desktop.
You can run Selenium ‘headless’ on Linux in XVFB. I’ve never tried doing this and doubt it’s really worth the effort. http://www.alittlemadness.com/2008/03/05/running-selenium-headless/
You can wrap Selenium RC in a Windows service. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/137890 . Except that permissions constraints on later versions of windows will probably prevent Selenium from accessing the desktop like Windows 2000 used to allow us to do.
Another option would be to use something like WebDriver HTMLUnitDriver, which doesn’t launch a ‘real’ browser. http://code.google.com/p/webdriver/ . Also there is a PhantomJS option as well as a ‘headless Chrome’ that you could use.
Of course there’s also the option of using a service like SauceLabs, where you can get your tests to be run in the cloud. After your tests have completed you can watch a video of them running.