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 3.8+

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 <https://pypi.org/project/selenium/#files>, 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://selenium.dev/')

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.by import By
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 test_page_title(self):
        self.browser.get('http://www.google.com')
        self.assertIn('Google', self.browser.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)

• python3.8 -m venv .venv && . .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 breakages.

• flake8 requires manual fixes

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

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