Using Selenium in the background

Question

I'm using Selenium and chrome webdriver but when I run scripts it opens a window. Is there any way that it can access the internet without the window popping up?

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.Chrome()

driver.get("https://ps.rsd.edu/public/")
elem = driver.find_element_by_name("account")
elem.send_keys("Username")
elem2 = driver.find_element_by_name("pw")
elem2.send_keys("Password")
elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

driver.quit()

For example, this goes to my school's grade site and puts in a username and password but I want to do this without the browser popping up if that's possible.

Lepidopterous

If you install pyvirtualdisplay (a wrapper for Xvfb), then you can run Selenium in a headless (virtual) display. Corey Goldberg shows a nice example of how to do this. – Loveliesbleeding

That will work perfectly thank you!!!! – Lepidopterous

i cant get it to work :( – Lepidopterous

Answer 1

I would suggest try using headless PhantomJs GhostDriver (which is a relatively new thing). As this is the native Selenium Webdriver way of doing it.

Download PhantomJs executables from http://phantomjs.org/download.html.

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS("./phantomjs") # path to phantomjs binary
driver.get("https://ps.rsd.edu/public/")

elem = driver.find_element_by_name("account")
elem.send_keys("Username")
elem2 = driver.find_element_by_name("pw")
elem2.send_keys("Password")
elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

driver.quit()

Specs

Im getting a long error message here is the end of it: raise WebDriverException("Unable to start phantomjs with ghostdriver.", e) WebDriverException: Message: 'Unable to start phantomjs with ghostdriver.' ; Screenshot: available via screen – Lepidopterous

@ChristianCareaga Can you please say how you figured out how to deal with that error? That's what's coming up for me now. Thanks. – Kalli

i had to write the full directory to phantomjs i think , but im not sure i wrote this awhile back and ended up doing something else – Lepidopterous

I'm also getting "Unable to start phantomjs with ghostdriver." The dev mentioned in a comment hasn't updated the python 2.7 selenium bindings. They're broken or something. – Ulcerate

I was getting the same error, but manually implementing the fix found here did the trick. It will be included in 2.40 when that comes out. – Reprove

I was having some issues, even with selenium 2.40. Once I passed in the full path to the phantomjs.exe, everything worked fine. – Telfore