How to automate a website using Selenium Python?

Can you use Selenium with Python?

Yes you can.

Selenium is a tool that you use to automate your web browser (like Chrome) for testing on the web. It uses the same HTTP requests, so you can use the same requests and responses that you would use in a normal web browser.

Selenium is used in automation for web apps, websites, mobile apps, and more. For websites it's perfect since it allows you to test every part of a website, including mobile apps.

However, you can also use Selenium for testing desktop software like Windows apps or Linux apps (called GUIs). You can use it for testing mobile apps with Xamarin, which is a cross-platform mobile app development technology. You can even test a Python script with Selenium as well.

How to install Selenium? You can download and install Selenium here. You can choose a binary, a binary with source, or an RPM package (which you will have to compile). To download Selenium 4.0:

Go to the download page and choose Binary. Download the .tar.gz package.

Unzip it to get the files you need to install. Install the Python bindings for your OS. On Mac, you can run pip install selenium . On Linux, you can run the command apt-get install python-pip python-selenium . On Windows, you can use the installer from the download page.

On Linux and Windows, you can use the pip install command to install selenium. On Mac, you can use Homebrew. To install selenium with Homebrew, type brew install selenium . On Linux, you can use Yum to install selenium.

How to run Selenium with Python? If you downloaded the Selenium bindings for Python, the next step is to install them. The following example assumes you are using Python 2.7, if you are using Python 3.x you need to install the binding for Python 3.x as well. The example should open a new browser with Google.

Why is Python Selenium used?

When looking for a tool to extract data from websites, there are few available tools that don't cost a lot of money (I remember having had this frustration on Linux many years ago). Therefore, even if you don't intend to start an extraction project now, it's worth to learn and use a framework such as Selenium. As a web automation framework, it allows you to record the actions you perform on websites, to check if they are as expected, and to build websites of your own in Java and C#.

A website may have several parts with unique structures or elements you may wish to ignore. Moreover, when you want to extract information that appears between two elements, these elements can be dynamically injected, and even have their attributes changed. There are also other services offered through a website you may not be aware of.

For example, on the Google homepage we can click on the link to search in the "Google Search" box. The link actually starts as a button: This part would not be interesting to extract (it simply triggers the search, in which we may have to wait some time), but the next part is the input field to enter what to search for: When you click on this field, it becomes initially just an input field that the next link will go to (and this is the same behaviour on every website): But this link is just a normal HTTP link that should not be taken as a text block that we want to extract. We need to add a CSS class to this link so the CSS styles for this class could be applied to this block: You can think about the same kind of things when using XPath and other functions provided by Selenium. But since you already installed Selenium via pip, we can go ahead and do all the things as a test, with a good output: Python Selenium is used because Python can interpret CSS and XPath. This allows you to apply the same kind of things you can do on the website (if a link is a class instead of a block).

How much Python is required for Selenium automation?

For example, Selenium webdriver is basically java class. What's the equivalent python class (library) to selenium? Is there any? I understand from one of the SO answers that selenium can be done in python. But from my current experience if I need to do a very simple automation using python with selenium, the time used is enormous, as most of the examples require installation of all python packages and setup of environment variables. That really takes lots of time and I wonder if it's possible to automate webpages with python only without installing/starting any packages? I know about selenium2lib, but there isn't any detailed example or instruction on how to start this library.

I have tried to do it, but don't seem to understand how it is working. Also it takes much longer than expected to learn and I think it's not worth. I was surprised to see that my experience is very different with all automation tool I am using and would like to know if there are some solutions like selenium2lib which can be used in a simple way.

Also one more thing I have noticed is, even if I start with my desired page opened, the browser never opens even after 3-4 mins. The test is running, yet the browser never opens! I am asking about selenium which can be started by 'java -jar selenium.jar' command.

Hi, @gabe I think you will get your answer here: , but I think it requires Python and is a little advanced if you want a beginner. I have used it and it's an awesome library for Python, but it's not something you can run as a . I hope this helps.

Hi @gabe. Yes, it's like Java, when using Selenium's Java API (java -jar selenium.jar) you have to have the Java JDK on your machine. Java is a programming language.

How to automate a website using Selenium Python?

How can I automate a website which is similar to this: I need a solution to: Click on buy now (in orange box, bottom right). Click on add to basket. Add item into basket and continue to next screen for payment. Go to next page. (Checkout screen) Fill in my details. (Credit Card or Paypal or Bank details) Proceed to checkout screen. Please suggest how can I automate such a website. Please also suggest that which tool should I use for automation

How should I start with the task

Can I automate it using Selenium

If so please explain how. I am a beginner in python. Please help me out.

This site has a great tutorial on writing selenium tests for Amazon. They go through the entire process of going from page to page and describing what the tests should do.

The key thing to remember is to break your code into different logical sections to make it easier to understand. If it helps, you can follow the tutorial until you get to "Adding Items to Your Basket" then just copy/paste your code (don't modify anything) into your own code to work on adding items to the basket.

You can use selenium to do all of that. A word of caution: as with everything, it's not impossible to do things wrong. You should test that you don't add duplicate items, that the items are added to the correct category and have all the correct values in each field. You may also need to watch out for timing problems and not testing too quickly.