This tutorial explains the steps to run the Selenium tests on Firefox browser in headless mode. We are going to run the tests in Selenium. To run the Selenium tests on Chrome browser in headless mode, refer this tutorial.
To start with, we need to add dependencies to the project.
Manually add the dependencies to the project
Download Selenium Version from here
Download Firefox Binary from here – Version 97.0.1
Download the latest version of WebDriverManager (Download this if you want to use WebDriverManager to download browser executables(exes) or binaries automatically, then skip downloading FireFox Binary).
Add the below dependencies to pom.xml or build.gradle.
Selenium 3
<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.seleniumhq.selenium/selenium-java -->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
<artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
<version>3.141.59</version>
</dependency>
What is headless browser?
A headless browser is like any other browser, but without a GUI (Graphical User Interface). A headless browser is used to automate the browser without launching the browser. While the tests are running, we could not see the browser, but we can see the test results coming on the console. This makes the test execution faster than normal execution. This is suitable for parallel testing as UI tests needs a lot of memory and resources.
The path of Gecko Driver (used for Firefox browser) needs to be set up in the Test using System.setProperty().Here, we use the methods setHeadless (true) of the FirfoxOptions class provided by Selenium WebDriver.
The complete program looks like as shown below:
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxOptions;
public class FirefoxOptionsHeadless1 {
public static void main(String[] args) {
// Set the path of GeckoDriver
System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver",
"C:\\Users\\Vibha\\Software\\geckodriver\\geckodriver.exe");
// Create an object of Firefox Options class
FirefoxOptions options = new FirefoxOptions();
// Set Firefox Headless mode as TRUE
options.setHeadless(true);
// Create an object of WebDriver class and pass the Firefox Options object
// as an argument
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(options);
// Navigate to site url
driver.get("https://duckduckgo.com/");
System.out.println("Executing Firefox Driver in Headless mode..");
System.out.println("Page Title : " + driver.getTitle());
System.out.println("Page URL : " + driver.getCurrentUrl());
// Close the driver
driver.close();
}
}
How to run headless Firefox Tests in Selenium using WebDriverManager?
WebDriverManager
<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/io.github.bonigarcia/webdrivermanager -->
<dependency>
<groupId>io.github.bonigarcia</groupId>
<artifactId>webdrivermanager</artifactId>
<version>5.1.0</version>
</dependency>
WebDriverManager.firefoxdriver().setup(): checks for the latest version of the specified WebDriver binary. If the binaries are not present on the machine, then it will download the WebDriver binaries. In this case, it is not needed to download Firefox binary and set up the path
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxOptions;
import io.github.bonigarcia.wdm.WebDriverManager;
public class FirefoxOptionsHeadless2 {
public static void main(String[] args) {
WebDriverManager.firefoxdriver().setup();
// Create an object of Firefox Options class
FirefoxOptions options = new FirefoxOptions();
// Set Firefox Headless mode as TRUE
options.setHeadless(true);
// Create an object of Firefox Driver class and pass the Firefox Options object
// as an argument
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(options);
// Navigate to the url
driver.get("https://duckduckgo.com/");
System.out.println("Executing Firefox Driver in Headless mode..");
System.out.println("Page Title : " + driver.getTitle());
System.out.println("Page URL : " + driver.getCurrentUrl());
// Close the driver
driver.close();
}
}
Congratulations!! We have run the tests in headless mode in FireFox.
QA Automation Expert 
This is deprecated code.
can you update this with recent changes in selenium
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This code is for Selenium version 3. There is change for Selenium Version 4 for which the tutorial will be updated in coming days.
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