Overview

Selenium is a tool that take control over the browsers and simulate web surfing activities. Therefore, it is able to replicate any action typically undertaken by a user, such as clicking, typing and retrieving data from web pages. I will show you how to setup and run Selenium using Python.

Setup

# Install the python package manager, pip.
    apt-get install python-pip
 
# Install Python bindings for Selenium.
    pip install selenium
 
# Download Webdriver for Chrome from 
#   <https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads>. 
    unzip chromedriver_linux64.zip

Run Selenium

Close all instances of your Chrome browser.
Run ./chromedriver on 1 terminal and then run the Python code below from another terminal.

#!/usr/bin/python3
# Description: The Python code below will search selenium in Google.
 
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
 
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://www.google.com")
 
search_box = driver.find_element_by_name('q')  # Find search input box.
search_box.send_keys('selenium')               # Type in selenium.
search_box.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)              # Press ENTER.
 
# Close.
#driver.close()

Here is a video showing the code above in action.

Selenium Hello World with Python

Overview

Setup

Run Selenium

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