The headless gem is a ruby wrapper for Xvfb that makes it super easy to run graphical applications (such as real web browsers) on a headless Linux machine. This gem is perfect for running headless Watir-WebDriver tests using a real browser.

An Example

require 'watir-webdriver'
require 'headless'
headless = Headless.new
headless.start
b = Watir::Browser.start 'www.google.com'
puts b.title
b.close
headless.destroy

A Cucumber Example

You should add the following code to your env.rb file:

if ENV['HEADLESS']
  require 'headless'
  headless = Headless.new
  headless.start
  at_exit do
    headless.destroy
  end
end