PhantomJS is broken out-of-box when installed on Ubuntu 16.04 with apt

[mileserickson]

1. Which version of PhantomJS are you using? Tip: run phantomjs --version.
   2.11

2. What steps will reproduce the problem?

   1. Launch an EC2 instance (t2.micro is adequate) with Ubuntu 16.04 (ami-a58d0dc5)
   2. sudo apt-get update
   3. sudo apt-get install phantomjs
   4. phantomjs --version returns:

QXcb connection: Could not connect to display
PhantomJS has crashed. Please read the bug reporting guide at
<http://phantomjs.org/bug-reporting.html> and file a bug report.
Aborted

Same behavior has been verified on a clean installation of Ubuntu 16.04 Server running on a local VM.

3. Which operating system are you using?
   Ubuntu 16.04

4. Did you use binary PhantomJS or did you compile it from source?
   Binary

5. Please provide any additional information below.
   This also affects operation with Selenium:

selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: Service phantomjs unexpectedly exited. Status code was: -6

Workaround: Setting QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen resolves this issue.

[balinabbb]

I ran into exactly the same error. The workaround of @mileserickson resolves the issue, but won't solve my problem. I am using phantomjs with selenium in python to create PDFs.

phantomjs --version 2.1.1 if QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreeen, else crashing:

PhantomJS has crashed. Please read the bug reporting guide at
<http://phantomjs.org/bug-reporting.html> and file a bug report.
Aborted (core dumped)

However if i am using this offscreen environment variable, pdf generation won't have proper paper size, and texts do not appear at all.
Usage:

    def create_pdf(url):
        driver = get_webdriver(request)
        driver.command_executor._commands['executePhantomScript'] = ('POST', '/session/$sessionId/phantom/execute')
        driver.get(url)

        def execute(script, args=[]):
            driver.execute('executePhantomScript', {'script': script, 'args': args})

        execute('''this.paperSize = {format: "A4", orientation: "portrait" };''')
        execute('''this.render("{}")'''.format('tmp.pdf'))


    def get_webdriver(request):
        regex = re.compile('^HTTP_')
        headers = dict((regex.sub('', header), value) for (header, value)
                   in request.META.items() if header.startswith('HTTP_'))
        for key, value in headers.items():
        webdriver.DesiredCapabilities.PHANTOMJS['phantomjs.page.customHeaders.{}'.format(key)] = value
        return webdriver.PhantomJS('phantomjs')

Any quick help is appreciated! I really need to solve this issue in a short time.
Cheers,
Bálint

[niklasp]

did you solve it?

[stale]

Due to our very limited maintenance capacity, we need to prioritize our development focus on other tasks. Therefore, this issue will be automatically closed (see #15395 for more details). In the future, if we see the need to attend to this issue again, then it will be reopened. Thank you for your contribution!