Installing Selenium WebDriver and Python on Amazon Linux

I'm configuring a headless server, hosted on AWS, for browser-based automated testing. I'll use Selenium WebDriver for browser automation, and I've chosen Python as the programming language.

I've seen instructions for setting up Selenium headless automated testing in Ubuntu. However, I decided to try Amazon Linux instead of Ubuntu, so those instructions were a good start, but not exactly what I needed.

I also borrowed heavily from this excellent article on installing Firefox on Amazon Linux.

And my Python code is straight from the example in the Selenium documentation.

Here are the steps that worked for me:

One-time initial setup:

Creating an AWS Instance:

• Log in to AWS and create a new Instance from Amazon Linux AMI 2013.09.1 (64-bit).
• I made my Instance a t1.micro, but you might want to choose something more powerful that will run faster.
• I created a new Security Group. You can do the same, or use an existing one. At a minimum, you must give your IP address access on port 22 (SSH).
• I associated my existing keypair with the Instance. If you don't already have a keypair, you can create a new one.
• I named my Instance tester. You can of course name it anything you like, or even leave the name blank.

Connect to the Instance using your favorite SSH client. I used the default browser-based Java client. The username is ec2-user.

Install Selenium (which requires pip, which in turn requires setuptools):

wget https://bitbucket.org/pypa/setuptools/raw/bootstrap/ez_setup.py
sudo python ez_setup.py
wget https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py
sudo python get-pip.py
sudo pip install selenium

Install Firefox (which requires the Gimp Tool Kit):

• Use your favorite text editor (I used vim) to create a new file named gtf-firefox.sh, and insert these lines:

#!/bin/bash
# GTK+ and Firefox for Amazon Linux
# Written by Joseph Lawson 2012-06-03
# http://joekiller.com
# http://joekiller.com/2012/06/03/install-firefox-on-amazon-linux-x86_64-compiling-gtk/
 
# chmod 755 ./gtk-firefox.sh
# sudo ./gtk-firefox.sh
 
 
TARGET=/usr/local
 
function init()
{
export installroot=$TARGET/src
export workpath=$TARGET
 
yum --assumeyes install make libjpeg-devel libpng-devel \
libtiff-devel gcc libffi-devel gettext-devel libmpc-devel \
libstdc++46-devel xauth gcc-c++ libtool libX11-devel \
libXext-devel libXinerama-devel libXi-devel libxml2-devel \
libXrender-devel libXrandr-devel libXt dbus-glib
mkdir -p $workpath
mkdir -p $installroot
cd $installroot
PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$workpath/lib/pkgconfig"
PATH=$workpath/bin:$PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH PATH
 
bash -c "
cat << EOF > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/firefox.conf
$workpath/lib
$workpath/firefox
EOF
ldconfig
"
}
 
function finish()
{
    cd $workpath
    wget -r --no-parent --reject "index.html*" -nH --cut-dirs=7 http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/linux-x86_64/en-US/
    tar xvf firefox*
    cd bin
    ln -s ../firefox/firefox
    ldconfig
}
 
function install()
{
    wget $1
    FILE=`basename $1`
    if [ ${FILE: -3} == ".xz" ]
       then tar xvfJ $FILE
       else tar xvf $FILE
    fi
SHORT=${FILE:0:4}*
    cd $SHORT
    ./configure --prefix=$workpath
    make
    make install
    ldconfig
    cd ..
}
 
init
install ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.69.tar.xz
install http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.4.9.tar.gz
install http://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/release/fontconfig-2.9.0.tar.gz
install http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/glib/2.32/glib-2.32.3.tar.xz
install http://cairographics.org/releases/pixman-0.26.0.tar.gz
install http://cairographics.org/releases/cairo-1.12.2.tar.xz
install http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/pango/1.30/pango-1.30.0.tar.xz
install http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/atk/2.4/atk-2.4.0.tar.xz
install http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdk-pixbuf/2.26/gdk-pixbuf-2.26.1.tar.xz
install http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gtk+/2.24/gtk+-2.24.10.tar.xz
finish
 
 
# adds the /usr/local/bin to your path by updating your .bashrc file.
cat << EOF >> ~/.bashrc
PATH=/usr/local/bin:\$PATH
export PATH
EOF

• chmod 755 ./gtk-firefox.sh
• sudo ./gtk-firefox.sh
• On my t1.micro Instance, this step took over an hour to run!

Create a "hello world" Selenium automation program in Python:

• Use a text editor to create a file named tester.py, and insert these lines:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait # available since 2.4.0
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC # available since 2.26.0

# Create a new instance of the Firefox driver
driver = webdriver.Firefox()

# go to the google home page
driver.get("http://www.google.com")

# find the element that's name attribute is q (the google search box)
inputElement = driver.find_element_by_name("q")

# type in the search
inputElement.send_keys("cheese!")

# submit the form (although google automatically searches now without submitting)
inputElement.submit()

# the page is ajaxy so the title is originally this:
print driver.title

try:
    # we have to wait for the page to refresh, the last thing that seems to be updated is the title
    WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.title_contains("cheese!"))

    # You should see "cheese! - Google Search"
    print driver.title

finally:
    driver.quit()

Set up the ability to run Firefox headless:

• Append this line to .bashrc: export DISPLAY=:10
• sudo yum install Xvfb

Step that must be performed after each time you reboot the Instance:

sudo Xvfb :10 -ac

Steps that must be performed each time you connect to the Instance after disconnecting:

• Connect to the Instance using an SSH client.
• Now open a second SSH session.
• If you try to run Firefox in the first SSH session, you’ll get an error, Xlib:  extension "RANDR" missing on display ":10".)
• firefox
• python tester.py

If it's working, you'll see the output Google, followed by cheese! - Google Search.