To set up Selenium, you’ll first need to have Python installed. Check out my other posts if you need help with that.
Next, you need to install Selenium. To do this, simply open up your Windows command prompt or Mac/Linux terminal and enter the command:
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pip install selenium |
Now that Selenium is installed, you need to pick a web browser for Selenium to use. Chrome and Firefox are both just as easy to use with Selenium, but here we’ll look at using Chrome. Assuming you have the Chrome browser installed on your machine, go to the following website:
https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads
Follow the link to the latest release and download the appropriate driver for your machine. Unzip the driver and move it to whatever place in your file system you prefer. Just keep in mind you will need to reference the chrome driver’s location when you use Selenium.
Finally, to make sure everything is working as it should, run this code:
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from selenium import webdriver # your executable path is wherever you saved the chrome webdriver chromedriver = "C:\\Users\\gstanton\\Downloads\\chromedriver.exe" browser = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=chromedriver) url = "https://www.duckduckgo.com" browser.get(url) |
If a Chrome browser pops up and takes you to DuckDuckGo’s home page, you’re all set!
If something’s not working, make sure Selenium, Chrome, and chrome driver are all up-to-date and try again. If all else fails, leave a comment and we’ll figure it out.
mark says
hey can you provide me a step by step installation for this. I followed the steps but when i try to install
pip install selenium cmd promt me that pip is not recognized as an internal or external command…
Grayson Stanton says
Hey Mark,
My guess is that Anaconda needs to be added to your PATH environment variable. During the Anaconda installation process, there is a screen that allows you to check a box to do this. It’s near the end of the process, as detailed here. It may be that this box was unchecked by default, and you moved past it without noticing. So if you want to, you can reinstall Anaconda and check that box. If you don’t want to go through installing it again, you can add Anaconda to your PATH manually as detailed here.
Let me know if this doesn’t work.
– Grayson