DZone
Web Dev Zone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
  • Refcardz
  • Trend Reports
  • Webinars
  • Zones
  • |
    • Agile
    • AI
    • Big Data
    • Cloud
    • Database
    • DevOps
    • Integration
    • IoT
    • Java
    • Microservices
    • Open Source
    • Performance
    • Security
    • Web Dev
DZone > Web Dev Zone > Taking Browser Screenshots With No Display (Selenium/Xvfb)

Taking Browser Screenshots With No Display (Selenium/Xvfb)

Corey Goldberg user avatar by
Corey Goldberg
·
May. 16, 12 · Web Dev Zone · Interview
Like (0)
Save
Tweet
23.69K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

In my last two blog posts, I showed examples of using Selenium WebDriver to capture screenshots, and running in a headless (no X-server) mode.

This example combines the two solutions to capture screenshots inside a virtual display.

To achieve this, I use a combination of Selenium WebDriver and pyvirtualdisplay (which uses xvfb) to run a browser in a virtual display and capture screenshots.

the setup you need is:

  • Selenium 2 Python bindings: PyPI
  • pyvirtualdisplay Python package (depends on xvfb): PyPI

On Debian/Ubuntu Linux systems, you can install everything with:

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip xvfb xserver-xephyr
$ sudo pip install selenium

once you have it setup, the following code example should work:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
from selenium import webdriver

display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
display.start()

browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('http://www.google.com')
browser.save_screenshot('screenie.png')
browser.quit()

display.stop()

this will:

  • launch a virtual display
  • launch Firefox browser inside the virtual display
  • navigate to google.com
  • capture and save a screenshot
  • close the browser
  • stop the virtual display
Python (language) POST (HTTP) Linux (operating system) Binding (linguistics) Blog

Published at DZone with permission of Corey Goldberg, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Popular on DZone

  • Take Control of Your Application Security
  • APIs Outside, Events Inside
  • SDLC Vs STLC: What's the Difference?
  • An Overview of 3 Java Embedded Databases

Comments

Web Dev Partner Resources

X

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Send feedback
  • Careers
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • MVB Program
  • Become a Contributor
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 600 Park Offices Drive
  • Suite 300
  • Durham, NC 27709
  • support@dzone.com
  • +1 (919) 678-0300

Let's be friends:

DZone.com is powered by 

AnswerHub logo