Set up and run Selenium on CentOS

Andrew

Getting Selenium + Chrome + CentOS up was a nightmare. I give up on Chrome and ChromeDriver on CentOS. I had Selenium and Chrome working locally on my Mac, but the exact steps do not rollover. After hours, I switched over to Firefox and it worked in 5 minutes. No additional driver needed either.

Here's my steps for running Selenium WebDriver in PHP on CentOS 7, using Firefox. I had a fresh server with nothing installed. You'll want to check out the repo (facebook/php-webdriver) and get things running locally before proceeding.

Check version of CentOS

I used an older server running CentOS 5 and ran into complications, so I made sure I was on CentOS 7.

$ cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS Linux release 7.2.1511 (Core)

Install Java & PHP on CentOS

Skip this if Java and PHP are installed. Make sure you have root privileges as well.

Java

$ yum install java-1.7.0-openjdk-devel

The java command should be available.

$ java -version
java version "1.7.0_101"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (rhel-2.6.6.1.el7_2-x86_64 u101-b00)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.95-b01, mixed mode)

PHP

$ yum install php

Install Firefox on CentOS

I read so many articles on Selnium and CentOS, but this gist saved the day: https://gist.github.com/textarcana/5855427

$ yum -y install firefox Xvfb libXfont Xorg
$ yum -y groupinstall "X Window System" "Desktop" "Fonts" "General Purpose Desktop"

Launch an XWindows Virtual Frame Buffer(XVFB) session on display port 99:

$ Xvfb :99 -ac -screen 0 1280x1024x24 &

Tell all XWindows applications in this terminal session to use the new Xvfb display port:

$ export DISPLAY=:99

Download Selenium Server

You're looking for the Selenium server as selenium-server-standalone-#.jar provided here: http://selenium-release.storage.googleapis.com/index.html. I'm using selenium-server-standalone-2.53.0.jar.

Run it as a background process

The importance is nuhup and & to run a process in the background on Linux.

nohup java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.53.0.jar &

Kill the process

TIL: If you want to kill the process, use ps to view running processes.

$ ps
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 5260 pts/1    00:00:00 bash
 5527 pts/1    00:00:00 java
 5550 pts/1    00:00:00 ps

And to terminate:

$ kill 5527

Run a test

Make sure libraries have been moved over or installed properly to the server. 

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/facebook/php-webdriver/community/example.php
$ php example.php

Finally. I can begin running my test cases.

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