How to hide your selenium browser window with "headless"

Note: While the solution in this card should still work, we prefer another solution now: Hide your Selenium browser window with a VNC server.

If you would like to hide the annoying selenium browser window that always gets the focus and prevents you from working, you can use the headless gem Show archive.org snapshot . This note provides some instructions how you can get it to work with your cucumber acceptance tests using selenium webdriver as a capybara driver.

1. Install xvfb if it is not installed yet on your system.

   sudo apt-get install xvfb
   

2. Add the headless gem to your Gemfile.

   group :cucumber do
     ...
     gem 'headless'
   end
   

3. Go to your features/support/env.rb file and include the following snippet:

   require 'headless'
   headless = Headless.new
   at_exit do
     headless.destroy
   end
   
   Before("@selenium,@javascript", "~@no-headless") do
     headless.start if Capybara.current_driver == :selenium
   end
   
   After("@selenium,@javascript", "~@no-headless") do
     headless.stop if Capybara.current_driver == :selenium
   end
   

   This starts an xvfb process, registers a hook to destroy the process on exit and starts and stops the headless mode if you are running a scenario
   that is tagged with @selenium or @javascript.

   If you don't want a specific scenario to hide the selenium browser window, you can tag it with @no-headless.

Note: If you are using paralell_tests to run your tests in parallel you have to take care of several things to get selenium to work. Please have a look at the note on running your tests in parallel.