Running Chrome WebDriver on a linux server with no display

I was facing the same challenge of setting a linux box with selenium + chromedriver,
and here’s my notes:

Pre-reqs:

1. Install JRE to run the selenium jar

2. Install the selenium server

   grab the jar file from https://code.google.com/p/selenium/downloads/list)

3. Install xvfb (you’ve seem to have already achieved this part)

4. Install google-chrome for your linux distribution

5. Download the chrome driver
   You can grab it from here: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads

6. Install other selenium dependencies that you might need (but the above is the minimum to get chromedriver to work)

To run:

1. Run xvfb

Xvfb :1 -screen 5 1024x768x8 &

export DISPLAY=:1.5

2. Run the selenium server jar with ChromeDriver options.
   It’ll look something like this:

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.30.0.jar -Dwebdriver.chrome.bin=/path/to/google-chrome -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=/path/to/chromedriver

3. The selenium server log should output something similar to this:

Mar 19, 2013 10:07:27 AM org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncher main
INFO: Launching a standalone server

Setting system property webdriver.chrome.bin to {location of google-chrome}

Setting system property webdriver.chrome.driver to {location of chromedriver}

10:07:34.258 INFO – RemoteWebDriver instances should connect to: http://127.0.0.1:4444/wd/hub

10:07:34.259 INFO – Version Jetty/5.1.x
10:07:34.259 INFO – Started HttpContext[/selenium-server/driver,/selenium-server/driver]
…

Reference:
http://www.yann.com/en/use-xvfb-selenium-and-chrome-to-drive-a-web-browser-in-php-23/08/2012.html

Cheers!