Setting java.awt.headless=true programmatically

I was working with a main() in a class which statically loads different parts of JFreeChart in Constants (and other static code).

Moving the static loading block to the top of the class solved my problem.

This doesn't work:

  public class Foo() {
    private static final Color COLOR_BACKGROUND = Color.WHITE;

    static { /* too late ! */
      System.setProperty("java.awt.headless", "true");
      System.out.println(java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment.isHeadless());
      /* ---> prints false */
    }

    public static void main() {}
  }

Have java execute the static block as early as possible by moving it to the top of the class!

  public class Foo() {
    static { /* works fine! ! */
      System.setProperty("java.awt.headless", "true");
      System.out.println(java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment.isHeadless());
      /* ---> prints true */
    }

    private static final Color COLOR_BACKGROUND = Color.WHITE;

    public static void main() {}
  }

When thinking about it this makes perfectly sense :). Juhu!

This should work because the call to System.setProperty is before the creation of the toolkit:

public static void main(String[] args)
{
    // Set system property.
    // Call this BEFORE the toolkit has been initialized, that is,
    // before Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit() has been called.
    System.setProperty("java.awt.headless", "true");

    // This triggers creation of the toolkit.
    // Because java.awt.headless property is set to true, this 
    // will be an instance of headless toolkit.
    Toolkit tk = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit();

    // Check whether the application is
    // running in headless mode.
    GraphicsEnvironment ge = 
        GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment();
    System.out.println("Headless mode: " + ge.isHeadless());
}

Here is a completely different approach.

try {
    Field defaultHeadlessField = java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment.class.getDeclaredField("defaultHeadless");
    defaultHeadlessField.setAccessible(true);
    defaultHeadlessField.set(null,Boolean.FALSE);
    Field headlessField = java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment.class.getDeclaredField("headless");
    headlessField.setAccessible(true);
    headlessField.set(null,Boolean.TRUE);
} catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (NoSuchFieldException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

I am using this successfully to draw on server-side BufferedImages in a headless environment (Ubuntu). The nice thing about this is that it does not require setting any -D variables on the command line, nor do you need to set the DISPLAY variable.

You can also execute this code at any time. You don't need to worry about invoking this before other classes are loaded.

I suppose this might not work if you were trying to drive a Swing interface on a remote machine from a headless environment.