Error when executing headless firefox through Selenium

Question

I am trying to execute headless firefox on the remote machine(running Ubuntu 16.04) through Selenium via SSH. However, this gives me a "Error: GDK_BACKEND does not match available displays" error. My host machine runs Windows. I do not want to see the graphical output. It is just being used for selenium testing.

I am using X Virtual Frame Buffer to act as a dummy driver:

Xvfb :10 -screen 0 1024x768x16 &

I also have exported the DISPLAY environment variable with the value of 10 for this specific case.

Where am I going wrong?

EDIT: When I simply run "sudo firefox" in my commandline over SSH after running xvbf, no errors are thrown. Errors are only thrown when running firefox through selenium.

More Details:-

I am calling firefox through selenium. The exact error that the selenium standalone server gives is:-

17:52:55.218 INFO - Executing: [new session: Capabilities     [{browserName=firefox, platform=ANY,     firefox_profile=UEsDBBQAAAAAAJuOD0nf9RXUMgAAA...}]])
17:52:55.230 INFO - Creating a new session for Capabilities   [{browserName=firefox, platform=ANY, firefox_profile=UEsDBBQAAAAAAJuOD0nf9RXUMgAAA...}]
org.openqa.selenium.firefox.NotConnectedException: Unable to connect to host     127.0.0.1 on port 7055 after 45000 ms. Firefox console output:
Error: GDK_BACKEND does not match available displays

Solution 1

Apparently this is caused because of incompatibility between Firefox 48 and Selenium(selenium extension is not signed in firefox 48, and firefox 48 only runs signed extensions). I just used chrome, as my use-case was not extremely browser-specific.

Solution 2

I solved this issue with Firefox. The steps are:

1. Downgraded Firefox from 49.0 to 46.0
2. Install XVFB by command sudo apt-get install xvfb
3. Run Selenium with the command xvfb-run java8 -jar selenium-project.jar

My Selenium version is 2.53.1 and Ubuntu 14.04.

Comments

[grochmal]

Apparently ubuntu does not come with xinit installed by default so, maybe, firefox cannot find that it should be using xorg as the backend.

[goluhaque]

@grochmal I do not really know xserver in depth. Can you please explain why I need xinit?

[goluhaque]

Apparently this is caused because of incompatibility between Firefox 48 and Selenium(selenium extension is not signed in firefox 48, and firefox 48 only runs signed extensions). I just went ahead with using chrome.