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I've been looking into this, as far as how I can run selenium browser instances in the background. I found some things about using a virtual GUI instance, or something like that, but it was all for Windows.

I'm using Ubuntu linux so I'm wondering what the easiest way would be to suppress the actual browser instances showing up for the user who started the selenium instances since I am threading like 25 of these, at the moment, and its kind of strange / annoying having all of them open.

Thanks for any advice.

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

If you are using Firefox you can do *custom path/to/browser --display=:0. If you want to use other browsers and writing your tests in java you can use htmlunit and specify the capabilities. If you are using ruby you can use capybara in a similar way to htmlunit.

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Try changing *firefox to *custom like I put above –  AutomatedTester Oct 4 '10 at 20:38
Thanks for the responses, I see about how I did that wrong (with the "custom" instead of firefox) but now I am trying: self.sel = selenium('localhost', 4444, '*custom /usr/bin/firefox --display=:0', 'http://mywebsiteurl') and what this does is end up opening a new tab on an already open firefox instance that I have and tries to append selenium-server/core/RemoteRunner.html?sessionId=f9c370de378a4ef9b0a64d66e148cb‌​ff&multiWindow=true&baseUrl=http%3A%2F%2Frickdanewebprogrammer.info&debugMode=fal‌​se to the http://mywebsiteurl in that new tab –  Rick Oct 4 '10 at 20:50
Is it the case where I need to not have any other firefox windows open for this to work? I am using a django web app dashboard to activate selenium, at the moment, so would have to rework it a bit to be able to try it this way (having no existing firefox instances open) –  Rick Oct 4 '10 at 20:51
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There is a possibility to run it in a virtual window system (Xvfb).

You might find something interesting here: http://wiki.openqa.org/display/SRC/Selenium-RC+and+Continuous+Integration

There are samples at the bottom of the page.

We're going to try that out pretty soon!

Good luck!

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