Do you wish you could leverage the power of Selenium? Do you long for it’s “automated web application UI tests”, but are boned by some headless horseman of a server? I have felt your pain. Tons of UI tests, but unable run them on the integration server. Ah, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel (that isn’t convincing the hosting company to attach a monitor)!

Here is the gist of it:

   nohup Xvfb :4 -screen 0 1024x768x24 2>&1 > xvfb.log &
   sleep 3 # give Xvfb a few seconds to sort itself out
   DISPLAY=4 nohup java -jar selenium-server.jar 2>&1 > selenium.log &

Basically, Xvfb creates a virtual X session, without the need for those kludgey monitors and keyboards. The Selenium Remote Control server is started up with the newly created Xvfb display, that is the DISPLAY=4 part. That is that, the Selenium server is now running on the default 4444 port using Xvfb.

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