I am facing challenges with headless browser automation in my project. I’ve attempted to utilize both PhantomJS and HtmlUnitDriver, but neither method has yielded successful results so far.
Currently, I am operating within an office proxy network, and I suspect that it might be the source of my issues. Below is my Selenium setup code for PhantomJS:
DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
capabilities.setJavascriptEnabled(true);
capabilities.setCapability(PhantomJSDriverService.PHANTOMJS_EXECUTABLE_PATH_PROPERTY, "C:/XXXX/Downloads/phantomjs-2.0.0-windows/phantomjs-2.0.0-windows/bin/phantomjs.exe");
WebDriver driver = new PhantomJSDriver(capabilities);
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
driver.get("www.google.com" + "/");
System.out.println(driver.getTitle());
I also tried using HtmlUnitDriver, here’s the code for that:
HtmlUnitDriver driver = new HtmlUnitDriver(true);
driver.setJavascriptEnabled(true);
driver.get("http://www.google.com");
System.out.println("Page title: " + driver.getTitle());
Unfortunately, neither of these methods displays the title of the webpage, and I receive no error messages. When running PhantomJS, I observe some initialization messages in the console, but there doesn’t seem to be any further activity.
I’m hoping someone can offer assistance. Thank you!
I’ve encountered similar issues when working behind corporate firewalls. The silent failure you’re experiencing is characteristic of proxy blocking rather than code problems. First, check with your IT department about the specific proxy server details including host, port, and whether authentication is required. Then configure your drivers accordingly. For PhantomJS, you can pass proxy arguments directly through the service args like --proxy=host:port and --proxy-auth=username:password if needed. With HtmlUnitDriver, you’ll need to set system properties for the proxy before creating the driver instance. Also worth noting that some corporate networks whitelist specific user agents, so you might need to set a standard browser user agent string. If possible, test your setup from outside the corporate network first to confirm the code works in isolation.
Corporate networks often block outbound connections on non-standard ports which could explain why your headless browsers are hanging without errors. The lack of error messages is actually typical when proxy configurations are missing because the drivers just timeout silently. You might want to check if your network requires authentication or uses specific ports. Try adding explicit proxy configuration to your capabilities and also consider increasing your timeout values since corporate proxies can be slower. Another thing to test is running a simple curl command from your machine to see if you can reach external sites at all. If PhantomJS shows initialization messages but stops there, it is probably getting blocked at the network level rather than having code issues.
yeah, seems like that proxy might be the issue. u should def add proxy settings to your capabilities, like capabilities.setCapability("proxy", proxyObject) or something. also, since phantomjs is kinda old, u could think about using chrome headless. it usually handles modern sites much better.