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Last active September 6, 2020 22:31
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Unable to call firefox from selenium in python on AWS machine while running functional tests
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selenium_firefox_tdd.md

While trying to run functional tests in python on an Ubuntu EC2 instance using
python manage.py test functional_tests --liveserver=superlist-staging.tk

I got this error
RuntimeError: Could not find firefox in your system PATH. Please specify the firefox binary location or install firefox So I did sudo apt-get install firefox to install firefox.

Afterwards I tried running the tests again and got another error:
WebDriverException: Message: The browser appears to have exited before we could connect. If you specified a log_file in the FirefoxBinary constructor, check it for details.

The issue is Selenium needs a display and as Linux does not have one , you need to download a virtual display (xvnc/xvfb). So I installed xfvb with sudo apt-get install xvfb

Then I ran the tests with xvfb like this - xvfb-run python manage.py test functional_tests --liveserver=superlist-staging.tk

I got another error:
WebDriverException: Message: Can't load the profile. Profile Dir: %s If you specified a log_file in the FirefoxBinary constructor, check it for details.

Turns out the reason is a version problem between the selenium server and python library. I updated selenium with pip install -U selenium and that resolved the issue.

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