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pythonseleniumselenium-webdriverraspbiangeckodriver

Cannot get selenium-webdriver running under Raspbian using Python and geckodriver

I am trying to get selenium running in headless mode on a raspberry pi. My scripts work perfectly fine on my Windows machine, but I just cannot get this particular combination working:

  • Raspbian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)
  • Python 3.7.3
  • geckodriver 0.23.0 ( 2018-10-04)
  • selenium-server-standalone-3.141.59
  • Mozilla Firefox 52.9.0

first I launch selenium-server-standalone as described in the documentation:

$ java -jar selenium-server-standalone-3.141.59.jar &
[1] 1842
14:39:26.881 INFO [GridLauncherV3.parse] - Selenium server version: 3.141.59, revision: e82be7d358
14:39:27.321 INFO [GridLauncherV3.lambda$buildLaunchers$3] - Launching a standalone Selenium Server on port 4444
2019-06-30 14:39:27.589:INFO::main: Logging initialized @2114ms to org.seleniumhq.jetty9.util.log.StdErrLog
14:39:28.755 INFO [WebDriverServlet.<init>] - Initialising WebDriverServlet
14:39:29.174 INFO [SeleniumServer.boot] - Selenium Server is up and running on port 4444

Then I run following test script in Python:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options
from pyvirtualdisplay import Display

display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 800))
display.start()

options = Options()
options.headless = True
driver = webdriver.Firefox(options=options)
driver.get("http://google.com/")
driver.quit()

And I get the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "debug3.py", line 10, in <module>
    driver = webdriver.Firefox(options=options)
  File "/usr/local/opt/python37/lib/python3.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/webdriver.py", line 174, in __init__
    keep_alive=True)
  File "/usr/local/opt/python37/lib/python3.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 157, in __init__
    self.start_session(capabilities, browser_profile)
  File "/usr/local/opt/python37/lib/python3.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 252, in start_session
    response = self.execute(Command.NEW_SESSION, parameters)
  File "/usr/local/opt/python37/lib/python3.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 321, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
  File "/usr/local/opt/python37/lib/python3.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 242, in check_response
    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: connection refused

According to this thread, I included pyvirtualdisplay. But there is not much difference in the outcome. Also the code in this thread does not work.

Solution

  • I identified the problem, which was a combination of three mistakes:

    1. There is no need to run selenium-server-standalone
    2. I wasn't using the right version of geckodriver, raspbian does not have to most recent build of Firefox/Iceweasel. The correct version for Mozilla 52 is geckodriver 0.17 The list of compatible versions is here and the releases of geckodriver are here.
    3. xvfb / pyvirtualdisplay is not necessary