Watir/Selenium - Why can I not connect to any browser?

Question

I'm trying for the first time to use Watir for automated browser-based testing. For all browsers I'm interested in testing with (Firefox, Chrome), I encounter timeout errors trying to connect.

Here's what I'm trying, with the errors I get in comments:

require "rubygems"
require "watir-webdriver"

browser = Watir::Browser.new :ff

# Selenium::WebDriver::Error::WebDriverError:
# unable to obtain stable firefox connection in 60 seconds (127.0.0.1:7055)

browser = Watir::Browser.new :chrome

# Selenium::WebDriver::Error::WebDriverError:
# unable to connect to chromedriver http://127.0.0.1:56602 

System/environment details:

• Ubuntu desktop 11.04
• Apache2 running on same host but only listening to port 80
• gem selenium-webdriver version is 2.17.0
• ruby version is 1.8.7

I'm guessing I'm doing something fundamentally wrong but I don't know enough to know where to start investigating what may be wrong. All I am aware of is that nothing is running on the ports that Selenium is trying to connect to.

What is needed for this to work?

Answer 1

Try the headless gem:

require 'rubygems'
require 'watir-webdriver'
require 'headless'

Headless.ly do
  browser = Watir::Browser.new :ff
end

Answer 2

Also, on RedHat based systems, the Xvfb binary is called "Xvfb". Make a link called "xvfb" so that the headless gem finds it.

$ ln -s /usr/bin/Xvfb /usr/local/bin/xvfb