How to Setup Selenium with Firefox on Ubuntu 18.04 & 16.04

Selenium is an automated web testing framework. Using this we can automate the browser functioning for testing any web application. Using selenium you can run predefined code to navigate between multiple pages and test application with predefined rules. This tutorial will help you to setup Selenium with Firefox on Ubuntu, Debian and LinuxMint systems.

Step 1 – Prerequisites

Execute the following commands to install required packages on your system. Here Xvfb (X virtual framebuffer) is an in-memory display server for a UNIX-like operating system (e.g., Linux). It implements the X11 display server protocol without any display. This is helpful for CLI applications like CI service.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y unzip xvfb libxi6 libgconf-2-4

Also, install Java on your system. Let’s install Oracle Java 8 on your system or use below command to install OpenJDK.

sudo apt-get install default-jdk 

Step 2 – Install Firefox

Firefox is available under default apt repositories. You can simply install it by running the following command from the command prompt.

sudo apt-get -y install firefox

Step 3 – Download Selenium Server Jar

The Selenium Server is required to run Remote Selenium WebDrivers. You need to download the Selenium standalone server jar file using the below commands or visit here to find the latest version of Jar file.

mkdir ~/selenium && cd ~/selenium 
wget https://selenium-release.storage.googleapis.com/3.13/selenium-server-standalone-3.13.0.jar

Also download the testng-6.0.1.jar file to your system.

wget http://www.java2s.com/Code/JarDownload/testng/testng-6.0.1.jar.zip
unzip testng-6.0.1.jar.zip

Step 4 – Start Chrome via Selenium Server

Your server setup is ready. Start the Chrome via standalone selenium server using Xvfb utility.

Run Selenium Server

DISPLAY=:1 xvfb-run java -jar ~/selenium/selenium-server-standalone-3.13.0.jar

Your Selenium server is now running with firefox. Use this server to run your test cases written in Selenium using the Firefox web browser.