Browser Automation with Python and Selenium — 1: Installation

Towards to starting…

Photo by Vanessa Bucceri on Unsplash

In the previous post, I made a quick introduction to the Selenium project. We will look at the installation steps to get started in this post.

We need to install the Python language binding to use Selenium with Python in our automation project. Currently supported Python versions are 3.5 and above. In addition to that, we will need WebDriver binaries for the browsers we want to automate and run the commands on.

Installing the Selenium library

• First things first, always use a virtual environment for your projects to isolate dependencies from the rest of the system.

python -m venv env
source env/bin/activate

• Install the selenium library using pip.

pip install selenium

• Alternatively, you can download the PyPI source archive and install it using setup.py.

python setup.py install

Installing WebDriver binaries

Drivers control the actual browsers. They are mostly created by browser vendors. As stated in the official documentation

Drivers are generally executable modules that run on the system…