Then, within your editor of choice (in my case, I use Visual Studio Code, also known as VS Code), create a new file, name it gettingstarted.py, and add the following code. Place the downloaded driver (which is usually an executable) within the folder that you will use to follow along with this project. On a Mac, the file is simply called chromedriver. On Windows the file is called chromedriver.exe. Preferably, choose the current stable release version that corresponds to your operating system. We can get the Chrome driver from the Chrome Driver website.

To get started, we need to first install the driver for the browser we will be using, which is Chrome. Selenium Test Driveįirst download our original Python code from my last article. The idea now is to take that solution to the next level and use Selenium WebDriver to help us fill in the values of our web form automatically, without having to open the browser’s developer tools manually.īut before we do that, let’s do a test drive with Selenium WebDriver and see how we can program some basic interactions with a headless browser. The only downside of that approach was that we had to open the browser’s developer tools to paste the generated JavaScript code, so the fields on the web page could get filled in. In How to Automate Filling In Web Forms with Python I used JavaScript and Python to automate a manual web form data entry process, by extracting data from PDFs. Thus, having the ability to control a browser through code, is very powerful. In other words, it’s a browser that doesn’t have a user interface, and can be commanded through code. The most widely used component within the Selenium ecosystem is WebDriver, which is a headless browser.

Selenium is great for testing web applications and finding usability bugs within them, but it is also frequently used in automating tasks that require the use of a web browser, or for crawling and scraping data off the web. This means that you can write tests using Selenium with any major programming language, such as Python, C#, Java, Ruby, and others.

It is a cross-platform portable framework for testing web applications, without the need to use or learn a specific testing language. Python & Selenium Automation Tutorial for Beginners I write about coding, the internet, and social impact. Faculty at Columbia University where I teach Digital Literacy. Chris Castiglione Follow Teacher at One Month.

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