Web automation with Selenium

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Overview

Web automation is a powerful tool. Devs mainly use it for UI testing, but there are a ton of other applications! In this post, I’ll be showing you how to automate your chrome browser in python using Selenium.

Content

Setup

You can navigate to the selenium page for more information on the API.

For this post, I will be using OSX (if you bug me, I’ll make one for windows and linux).

  1. Install pip by opening your terminal and entering sudo easy_install pip.

  2. Install selenium by typing pip install selenium in the terminal.

  3. We also need the chome webdriver to actually connect to chrome and automate it. You can easily install it with homebrew typing brew install chromedriver in the terminal.

Plan

  1. Go to www.google.com
  2. Type GabrielGhe in the searchbox
  3. Go to GabrielGhe.github.io
  4. Type java in the searchbox

This is what it should look like at the end. Plan

Code

We can code now that we know what we want to achieve. The gist below does what’s being displayed in the gif above. Run it yourself to see it live in action!

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import time
from selenium import webdriver

WAIT_TIME = 3

# Create the webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()  

# Open Chrome and go to google.com
driver.get('http://www.google.com/xhtml');

# Wait for 3 seconds so that you can see what's going on
time.sleep(WAIT_TIME)

# Grab the search box and type in  'GabrielGhe'
search_box = driver.find_element_by_name('q')
search_box.send_keys('GabrielGhe')
search_box.submit()
time.sleep(WAIT_TIME)

# go to another url
driver.get('http://gabrielghe.github.io');
time.sleep(WAIT_TIME)
gabrielghe_search_box = driver.find_element_by_id('q')
gabrielghe_search_box.send_keys('java')
time.sleep(WAIT_TIME)

# Quit after 3 seconds
time.sleep(WAIT_TIME)
driver.quit()

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