Running Selenium on a Docker Development Container

I spent quite some time getting Selenium working on my development container. At the end, the solution was quite simple and I thought it would be a good idea to share it.

I have tried to get this running by installing all the required software on my development container directly, but nothing really seemed to work, specifically I was unable to successfully launch the Chrome.

Luckily, the solution is quite simple and as I was already using Docker compose anyway.

The solution that worked was to simply have a dedicated container to run a standalone Selenium instance.

  myapp-chrome:
    image: selenium/standalone-chrome:124.0
    ports:
      - "4444:4444"
      - "7900:7900"
    shm_size: "2g"

That’s basically it. To connect Selenium, I use these configuration options:

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("--headless=new");
options.addArguments("--disable-gpu");
options.addArguments("--disable-dev-shm-usage");
options.addArguments("--no-sandbox");
options.addArguments("window-size=1920,1080");
options.setAcceptInsecureCerts(true);

String hubUrl = "http://myapp-chrome:4444/wd/hub";

driver = new RemoteWebDriver(new URL(hubUrl), options);

Hope someone finds this useful. 🙂