Selenium

Intro

Selenium WebDriver — it is a tool for automating web browser actions.

In most cases, it is used for testing Web applications, but it is not limited to this.

Selenium Webdriver itself, unlike, for example, the Selenium IDE, does not contain anything for testing, so it is used in conjunction with testing libraries that are available in most modern programming languages.

In Python there are unittest, nose, pytest and others. In Java it is e.g. JUnit.

In particular, it can be used to solve routine site administration tasks or regularly receiving data from various sources (sites).

In this article, you will learn how to use Selenium without being tied to any programming language.

«Selenium + Python article contains guides on writing tests with Python and Selenium . To read about Java and Selenium you can visit Selenium + Java page

Add WebDriver in Windows

Visit selenium.dev and download the driver for the desired browser.

For example for Firefox

Download the archive with the driver. For Windows x64, select .zip file

Unpack the archive. I unpacked it into a folder C:\webdrivers

Add the path to this folder to the system variable PATH .

In the search, type env

In System Variables click New

Create a new variable named WEBDRIVER_PATH in the value field specify the path to the folder in which you have to put geckodriver.exe

Select the Path variable and click Edit

Click New and enter %WEBDRIVER_PATH%

Add WebDriver to Linux

First: you need to download WebDriver with exactly the same version as your actuall Chrome has.

Same applies to Firefox

Second: you need to add directory with WebDriver to system PATH

Check Chrome version

Check your google-chrome version by running

google-chrome --version

Google Chrome 89.0.4389.114

Chrome version can be checked in GUI as well. Open browser and visit Settings → About Chrome

Upgrade google-chrome to latest available stable version for linux

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get --only-upgrade install google-chrome-stable

Check the updated version

google-chrome --version

Google Chrome 90.0.4430.93

Visit selenium.dev and download

• chromedriver_linux64.zip for Chrome ( Download )
• or geckodriver-v0.29.1-linux64.tar.gz for Firefox ( Download )

Note that you should download exactly the same version as you have in your system.

Lets proceed assuming that they are now in a Downloads folder.

If they are in another folder please replace /Downloads with the proper path

ls -l ~/Downloads | grep linux64

-rw-r--r-- 1 andrei urnsu 5891445 May 6 15:59 chromedriver_linux64.zip -rw-r--r-- 1 andrei urnsu 2716874 May 6 16:33 geckodriver-v0.29.1-linux64.tar.gz

Create directory /opt/WebDriver/bin and copy the driver archives there

sudo mkdir -p /opt/WebDriver/bin
sudo cp ~/Downloads/chromedriver_linux64.zip ~/Downloads/geckodriver-v0.29.1-linux64.tar.gz /opt/WebDriver/bin
ls -l /opt/WebDriver/bin

-rw-rw-r-- 1 andrei andrei 5564194 Nov 20 10:05 chromedriver_linux64.zip
-rw-rw-r-- 1 andrei andrei 2650003 Nov 20 10:05 geckodriver-v0.29.1-linux64.tar.gz

Go to /opt/WebDriver/bin and uppack the archives

cd /opt/WebDriver/bin
sudo tar -xvzf geckodriver-v0.29.1-linux64.tar.gz
sudo unzip chromedriver_linux64.zip
ls -laFh /opt/WebDriver/bin

total 27M drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Nov 20 10:46 ./ drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Nov 20 10:07 ../ -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 11M Oct 15 23:34 chromedriver* -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5.4M Nov 20 10:19 chromedriver_linux64.zip -rwxr-xr-x 1 sshit sshit 7.6M Nov 3 18:13 geckodriver* -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.6M Nov 20 10:19 geckodriver-v0.29.1-linux64.tar.gz

After successful unpacking, you can make sure that there are two executable files:

chromedriver and geckodriver

Add /opt/WebDriver/bin to PATH

Open .bashrc and add the following code there

vi ~/.bashrc

PATH="/opt/WebDriver/bin:${PATH}" export PATH

Restart terminal

exec bash

Make Selenium Fullscreen

The first way is to open it in kiosk mode

from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options chromeOptions = webdriver.ChromeOptions() chromeOptions.add_argument("--kiosk") driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chromeOptions)

The second way is to set the driver a width equal to the width of your screen

driver.set_window_size(1920, 1024)

Actions

clear, click, findElement, findElements, getAttribute, getCssValue, sendKeys, submit, isDisplayed, isEnabled, getLocation, isSelected, getSize, getTagName, getText,

Determine the appropriate selector

If something doesn't work out manually, you can try online services, for example try.jsoup.org

Errors

Exception in thread "main" org.openqa.selenium.ElementNotInteractableException: element not interactable

Usually appears if you are trying to execute < b>SendKeys on an element that doesn't support it.

SessionNotCreatedException: Message: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 91
Current browser version is 89.0.4389.114 with binary path /usr/bin/google-chrome

Means that you have downloaded WebDriver with a different version than your installed browser has.

These versions should match.

Update your Chrome to latest version (may not match still) or download chromedriver that matches your installed version as described here