Selenium is a web testing toolkit that allows you to test a web site in a browser of your choice.
In this post I’m going to explain how to setup Selenium with Firefox and PhantomJS on a RHEL / Centos 7.

We start off by installing pip which in turn installs selenium.

[root@vm1 ~]# easy_install pip
[root@vm1 ~]# pip install selenium

Lets have a quick test to see if it works

[root@vm1 ~]# python
Python 2.7.5 (default, Aug 2 2016, 04:20:16)
[GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-4)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import selenium
>>> import unittest
>>> quit()

So that’s a success.

Moving on to Xvfb and firefox:
Xvfb is a display server that does everything in memory without showing anything on the screen.

This makes it ideal for automated testing on a headless system.
Xvfb is present in the default repos of Centos (Optional repo in RHEL).

[root@vm1 ~]# yum install xorg-x11-server-Xvfb firefox

Easy enough, lets test it out by starting Xvfb and checking if we can run firefox in the foreground without errors:

[root@vm1]# Xvfb :0 -ac &
[2] 18787 
[root@vm1]# export DISPLAY=:1
[root@vm1]# firefox
Xlib: extension "RANDR" missing on display ":1".
GLib-GIO-Message: Using the 'memory' GSettings backend. Your settings will not be saved or shared with other applications.

You can kill it with ctrl-c after that.
Since version 3.0.2 the Selenium documentation explicitly states you need to install the gecko driver.
If you really don’t want this install a 2.x version. The latest is 2.53.6.

[kevin@vm1]$ wget https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases/download/v0.17.0/geckodriver-v0.17.0-linux64.tar.gz

Copy the geckodriver in /usr/local/bin. You can install is somewhere else but then you need to add it to the path.

[kevin@vm1]$ cd /usr/local/bin/
[kevin@vm1 bin]$ ls
[kevin@vm1 bin]$ sudo tar -xvzf ~/geckodriver-v0.17.0-linux64.tar.gz
[sudo] password for kevin:
geckodriver
[kevin@vm1 bin]$ sudo chown root:root geckodriver
[kevin@vm1 bin]$ ll
total 6972
-rwxrwxr-x. 1 root root 7136049 Jun 9 17:47 geckodriver

So that’s one browser present and ready to go. I also added PhantomJS as a secondary webdriver. PhantomJS requires some basic libraries.

yum install fontconfig freetype freetype-devel fontconfig-devel libstdc++

Next we download Phantomjs and install it under /opt.

[kevin@vm1 ~]$ sudo mkdir -p /opt/phantomjs
[sudo] password for kevin:
[kevin@vm1 ~]$ cd /opt/phantomjs/
[kevin@vm1 phantomjs]$ sudo tar -xvjf ~/phantomjs-2.1.1-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2 --strip-components 1

Run a quick test:

[kevin@vm1 phantomjs]$ bin/phantomjs examples/hello.js
Hello, world!

All we have left now is write a little test script. In this case I use PhantomJS to check the some basic stuff on the python.org site.  My systems use a proxy so I added that as well to the code:

import unittest
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
 
class PythonOrgSearch(unittest.TestCase):
 
 def setUp(self):
 service_args = [
 '--proxy=127.0.0.1:3128',
 '--proxy-type=http'
 ]
 self.driver = webdriver.PhantomJS('/opt/phantomjs/bin/phantomjs',service_args=service_args)
 self.driver.set_window_size(1124,850)
 
 def test_search_in_python_org(self):
 driver = self.driver
 driver.get("http://www.python.org")
 assert "Bolero" in driver.title
 elem = driver.find_element_by_name("q")
 elem.clear()
 elem.send_keys("python")
 elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
 assert "No results found" not in driver.page_source
 
 def tearDown(self):
 self.driver.close()
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
 unittest.main()