Selenium – no display specified

I’m not very experienced with X-windows on the Linux platform, so I’m not too skilled in troubleshooting issues with the display. I recently upgraded an Ubuntu system at work to use Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), which only has Firefox 3 available (no package for Firefox 2). I had a Selenium server setup running tests, but they stopped working after I upgraded to this newer version of Ubuntu.

I thought that perhaps Selenium wasn’t compatible with version 3 of Firefox, but this isn’t the case. The Selenium website says ‘Firefox 2+’ for browsers running on Linux.

The error I was receiving when I would run a test was:

10:46:19.778 INFO - Preparing Firefox profile... Error: no display specified

After a bunch of research and Googling online, it turned out I just needed to run this before I started my Selenium server:

export DISPLAY=:0

I hope this saves someone else some time.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 2:51 pmand is filed under computing tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Selenium – no display specified”

Nigel Horne Says:
February 25th, 2010 at 1:32 pm
I tried that, but I still get the same error:

Error: no display specified
Nigel Horne Says:
February 25th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Sorry, wrong error message. What I see *after* implementing your suggestion is

Error: cannot open display: :0
Onlineproxy Says:
April 7th, 2010 at 10:02 am
hello.
i ve got the same problem.

Error: no display specified
when try to start firefox via selenium.

seems to be something with $DISPLAY???
kzg Says:
May 8th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
export DISPLAY=:0
this saved me a lot of time, thx
Jeevan Pingali Says:
June 14th, 2010 at 9:34 am
It definitely helped me, thank you
SeanG Says:
July 20th, 2010 at 9:06 pm
This definitely helped me. Thanks!!

redconfetti