Selenium Client Driver

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, Edge, Safari), as well as the Remote protocol.

Supported Python Versions

  • Python 3.9+

Installing

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

pip install -U selenium

You may want to consider using a virtual environment to create isolated Python environments.

Drivers

Selenium requires a driver to interface with the chosen browser (chromedriver, edgedriver, geckodriver, etc).

In older versions of Selenium, it was necessary to install and manage these drivers yourself. You had to make sure the driver executable was available on your system PATH, or specified explicitly in code. Modern versions of Selenium handle browser and driver installation for you with Selenium Manager. You generally don’t have to worry about driver installation or configuration now that it’s done for you when you instantiate a WebDriver. Selenium Manager works with most supported platforms and browsers. If it doesn’t meet your needs, you can still install and specify browsers and drivers yourself.

Links to some of the more popular browser drivers:

Example 0:

  • launch a new Chrome browser

  • load a web page

  • close the browser

from selenium import webdriver


driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get('https://selenium.dev/')
driver.quit()

Example 1:

  • launch a new Chrome browser

  • load the Selenium documentation page

  • find the “Webdriver” link

  • click the “WebDriver” link

  • close the browser

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By


driver = webdriver.Chrome()

driver.get('https://selenium.dev/documentation')
assert 'Selenium' in driver.title

elem = driver.find_element(By.ID, 'm-documentationwebdriver')
elem.click()
assert 'WebDriver' in driver.title

driver.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.driver = webdriver.Firefox()
        self.addCleanup(self.driver.quit)

    def test_page_title(self):
        self.driver.get('https://www.google.com')
        self.assertIn('Google', self.driver.title)

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

Selenium Grid (optional)

For local Selenium scripts, the Java server is not needed.

To use Selenium remotely, you need to also run the Selenium grid. For information on running Selenium Grid: https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/grid/getting_started/

To use Remote WebDriver see: https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/webdriver/drivers/remote_webdriver/?tab=python

Use The Source Luke!

View source code online:

Contributing

  • Create a branch for your work

  • Ensure tox is installed (using a virtualenv is recommended)

  • Run: python -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate && pip install tox

  • After making changes, before committing execute tox -e linting

  • If tox exits 0, commit and push. Otherwise fix the newly introduced style violations.

  • flake8 requires manual fixes

  • black will rewrite the violations automatically, however the files are unstaged and should staged again.

  • isort will rewrite the violations automatically, however the files are unstaged and should staged again.