XVFB and Selenium on EC2 - Unable to view Chrome UI on VNC Viewer

Question

My Selenium headless tests are triggered from Jenkins server and run in EC2-Ubuntu. I want to view the test live on Chrome so I installed Xvfb plugin on Jenkins.

On EC2 I installed Xvfb. When I start executing the build, my test starts execution and I see below logs:

Xvfb  /usr/bin/Xvfb :1 -fbdir /var/lib/jenkins/xvfb-27-..fbdir13700092919317283985
Parsing POMs
Established TCP socket on 30810

and I see the test is running successfully.

Now I do SSH to EC2 from Mac terminal by

ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 [email protected]

Then I execute:

qa_user@jenkins-it:~$ export DISPLAY=: 30810 (Port number from Jenkins logs above)
qa_user@jenkins-it:~$ vncserver "$DISPLAY" -geometry 1280x1024

New 'X' desktop is jenkins-it: 30810

Starting applications specified in /home/qa_user/.vnc/xstartup Log file is /home/qa_user/.vnc/jenkins-it: 30810.log

qa_user@jenkins-it:~$ x11vnc --listen 0.0.0.0 -rfbport 5901 -display : 30810

This starts XVFB and I see:

Now when I connect from Mac to localhost:5901 from VNCviewer, I am taken to Ubuntu desktop.

But I don't see chrome opening up even though the test is running and I see test logs on Jenkins.

I am also able to use Chrome via VncViewer.

What am I missing here? I tried many Xvfb set up instructions and has been trying to get this right since a month now. Here are few questions I asked:

Looking for a solution to run selenium tests on EC2 with GUI

Long way till here and now Stackoverflow is my last resort. Please help.

Answer 1

I found the solution to this myself. For anyone who's having the same issue:

What I did wrong was I used driver = new ChromeDriver(options); in my code instead of driver = new RemoteWebDriver(new URL("http://my.aws.ip:4444/wd/hub"), options);

After making this change, I downloaded selenium-server-standalone.jar to in EC2.

Then, before starting the test, I did ssh -X [email protected] to EC2 and executed:

Xvfb :99 -ac -screen 0 1280x1024x24 &
export DISPLAY=:99
java -jar /home/qa_user/Selenium/selenium-server-standalone.jar

Now, execute the test, in parallel I opened a new terminal and did:

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 [email protected]

Once the screen was set, I did:

x11vnc -xkb -noxrecord -noxfixes -noxdamage -display :99 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0  -rfbport 5900

Next, open VNC viewer, connect to localhost:5900 and you'll see Chrome execution.

Later you can move all this to Jenkins pre-build execute shell if required :)

More details on my latest answer: XVFB on Jenkins connecting to wrong display. Display shows black screen.