pip install selenium

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Selenium is a web automation tool. A web browser can be controlled using Python code, any task you would normally do on the web can be done using the selenium module.

To use use selenium, you need both the selenium module and the web driver installed. This can be quite tricky to get right, if you are new to selenium I recommend the course below.

Install selenium

To get started, first you should setup a virtual environment. Once that’s setup and activated, you want to install the selenium module inside it. You can do that by typing the command:


pip install -U selenium

This will install the selenium module, but that’s not all yet. You need to install the driver.

Then get the web driver from https://docs.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver. There are all kind of webdrivers including:

ChromeDriver
FirefoxDriver
RemoteWebDriver
EdgeDriver
IEDriver
SafariDriver
OperaDriver

Selenium Example

Depending on which driver you install, you can load a different browser. If you use Chrome, you could do this:

from selenium.webdriver import Chrome
driver = Chrome()

For the Firefox driver, initialize like this:

from selenium.webdriver import Firefox
driver = Firefox()

This also works for Edge

from selenium.webdriver import Edge
driver = Edge()

After installation of the web driver, we can make Python start the browser using the code below:


from selenium import webdriver
import time

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('--ignore-certificate-errors')
options.add_argument("--test-type")
options.binary_location = "/usr/bin/chromium"
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)
driver.get('https://python.org')