To set up Selenium, you must first have Python installed. I recommend installing Python 3 via Anaconda, which is detailed here. This will also give you the Spyder development environment, which I recommend as well.
Next, if you’re using Windows, open up your command prompt and type:
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pip install selenium |
or an equivalent command in Mac or Linux Terminal.
Now that Selenium is installed, you need to pick a web browser for Selenium to use. To get things up and running with the fewest possible errors, I recommend starting with Google Chrome. Firefox is my personal preference, but as things now stand there can be a few kinks with setting it up, so we’ll focus on Chrome for now. Assuming Chrome is installed, 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 browser = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="C:\\Users\\gstanton\\Downloads\\chromedriver.exe") url = "https://www.google.com" browser.get(url) |
If a Chrome browser pops up and takes you to Google’s home page, you’re all set!
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