unable to call firefox from selenium in python on AWS machine

The problem is Firefox requires a display. I've used pyvirtualdisplay in my example to simulate a display. The solution is:

from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
from selenium import webdriver

display = Display(visible=False, size=(1024, 768))
display.start()

driver= webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://www.somewebsite.com/")

<---some code--->

#driver.close() # Close the current window.
driver.quit() # Quit the driver and close every associated window.
display.stop()

Please note that pyvirtualdisplay requires one of the following back-ends: Xvfb, Xephyr, Xvnc.

This should resolve your issue.

I too had faced same problem.I was on Firefox 47 and Selenium 2.53. So what I did was downgraded Firefox to 45. This worked.

1) Remove Firefox 47 first :

sudo apt-get purge firefox

2) Check for available versions:

apt-cache show firefox | grep Version

It will show available firefox versions like:

Version: 47.0+build3-0ubuntu0.16.04.1

Version: 45.0.2+build1-0ubuntu1

3) Tell which build to download

sudo apt-get install firefox=45.0.2+build1-0ubuntu1

4) Next you have to not upgrade to the newer version again.

sudo apt-mark hold firefox

5) If you want to upgrade later

sudo apt-mark unhold firefox sudo apt-get upgrade

Hope this helps.