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Selenium – no display specified

Written on January 11, 2010 by redconfetti in computing tips

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.

13 Comments - Leave a comment!

13 Responses to Selenium – no display specified

Nigel Horne
February 25, 2010 | 1:32 pm

I tried that, but I still get the same error:

Error: no display specified
Nigel Horne
February 25, 2010 | 1:44 pm

Sorry, wrong error message. What I see *after* implementing your suggestion is

Error: cannot open display: :0
Onlineproxy
April 7, 2010 | 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
May 8, 2010 | 4:23 pm

export DISPLAY=:0
this saved me a lot of time, thx
Jeevan Pingali
June 14, 2010 | 9:34 am

It definitely helped me, thank you
SeanG
July 20, 2010 | 9:06 pm

This definitely helped me. Thanks!!
David Miller
July 30, 2010 | 7:49 am

Many thanks, spent the best part of a morning not thinking of this :)
tejas
February 3, 2011 | 3:15 pm

After adding env variable DISPLAY don’t run firefox as a root.
Sami R.
February 10, 2011 | 11:51 pm

Just what I needed, thanks!
goph-R
February 24, 2011 | 11:36 am

Thanks man! It is very helpful!
Ansuman
July 4, 2011 | 8:44 am

I am facing a different problem.

when I try to run a code as JUnit test case,

it gives me a message like this in command prompt.

11:20:41.382 INFO – Command request: getNewBrowserSession[*firefox, http://www.l
ogica.com/, ] on session null
11:20:41.382 INFO – creating new remote session
11:20:41.384 INFO – Allocated session c3a6b2920e0e42289266f5e132dc0593 for http:
//www.logica.com/, launching…
11:20:46.268 INFO – Preparing Firefox profile…

it stays there forever. does not do anything.
then I created my own firefox profile, but still the same problem. cant understand whats the problem really !!

Someone please help. !!!!

thanks
dom
October 14, 2011 | 12:11 pm

awesome! thankyou!, I searched for ages but my search stopped here :D
tojo
December 19, 2011 | 5:39 pm

Thanks for posting this, saved me tons of time!