Introduction

Python language bindings for Selenium WebDriver.

The selenium package is used to automate web browser interaction from Python.

Several browsers/drivers are supported (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer), as well as the Remote protocol.

Supported Python Versions

• Python 2.7, 3.4+

Installing

If you have pip on your system, you can simply install or upgrade the Python bindings:

pip install -U selenium

Alternately, you can download the source distribution from PyPI (e.g. selenium-3.141.0.tar.gz), unarchive it, and run:

python setup.py install

Note: You may want to consider using virtualenv to create isolated Python environments.

Drivers

Selenium requires a driver to interface with the chosen browser. Firefox, for example, requires geckodriver, which needs to be installed before the below examples can be run. Make sure it’s in your PATH, e. g., place it in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin.

Failure to observe this step will give you an error selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: ‘geckodriver’ executable needs to be in PATH.

Other supported browsers will have their own drivers available. Links to some of the more popular browser drivers follow.

Example 0:

• open a new Firefox browser
• load the page at the given URL

from selenium import webdriver

browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('http://seleniumhq.org/')

Example 1:

• open a new Firefox browser
• load the Yahoo homepage
• search for “seleniumhq”
• close the browser

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

browser = webdriver.Firefox()

browser.get('http://www.yahoo.com')
assert 'Yahoo' in browser.title

elem = browser.find_element_by_name('p')  # Find the search box
elem.send_keys('seleniumhq' + Keys.RETURN)

browser.quit()

Example 2:

Selenium WebDriver is often used as a basis for testing web applications. Here is a simple example using Python’s standard unittest library:

import unittest
from selenium import webdriver

class GoogleTestCase(unittest.TestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        self.browser = webdriver.Firefox()
        self.addCleanup(self.browser.quit)

    def testPageTitle(self):
        self.browser.get('http://www.google.com')
        self.assertIn('Google', self.browser.title)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    unittest.main(verbosity=2)

Selenium Server (optional)

For normal WebDriver scripts (non-Remote), the Java server is not needed.

However, to use Selenium Webdriver Remote or the legacy Selenium API (Selenium-RC), you need to also run the Selenium server. The server requires a Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

Download the server separately, from: http://selenium-release.storage.googleapis.com/3.141/selenium-server-standalone-3.141.0.jar

Run the server from the command line:

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-3.141.0.jar

Then run your Python client scripts.

Use The Source Luke!

View source code online: