Firefox with Selenium (Headless)

Question

How to use selenium with firefox to scrape websites?

Install Firefox, xvfb, selenium

echo "deb http://packages.linuxmint.com debian import" >> /etc/apt/sources.list && apt-get update
apt-get install firefox xvfb python-dev python-pip
pip install pyvirtualdisplay selenium

selenium_scrape.py

from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
import time
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException

display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
display.start()

def init_driver():
    driver = webdriver.Firefox()
    driver.wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 5)
    return driver

def lookup(driver, query):
    driver.get("http://www.google.com")
    try:
    box = driver.wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located(
        (By.NAME, "q")))
    button = driver.wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable(
        (By.NAME, "btnK")))
    box.send_keys(query)
button.click()
    except TimeoutException:
        print("Box or Button not found in google.com")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    driver = init_driver()
    lookup(driver, "Selenium")
    time.sleep(5)
    driver.quit()

display.stop()

Error

  File "selenium_scrape.py", line 20
    box = driver.wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located(
      ^
IndentationError: expected an indented block

Answer 1

The difference is that you cannot use a packaged Chrome browser; you need a special driver... chromedriver.

Get the current latest version here: Chromedriver

Now you have 2 options, either to move the downloaded chromedriver so it is always accessible (option 1), or to define in your script how to access it.

Option 1: move it into path

Then move it so it is accessible when you use webdriver.Chrome():

sudo mv /path/to/download/chromedriver /usr/bin

Also set it to be allowed to be executed:

chmod a+x /usr/binchromedriver

Option 2: do not move it into path

Or you can define a path

import os
chr = "/Users/you/Downloads/chromedriver"
os.environ["webdriver.chrome.driver"] = chr
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chromedriver)