How to set up rselenium for R?

Question

"everything was better back then"...

since firefox 49 (?) you can't use the rselenium package not straightforward anymore. I have searched the whole internet to find a SIMPLE How To Manual for setting up rselenium but did not find anything relevant and uptodate.

Can someone provide me and all the others out there who have no clue a simple How To manual? Like:

1. download XY
2. open AB

so I can run code like the following

require(RSelenium)

remDr <- remoteDriver(remoteServerAddr = "localhost", port = 4444L, 
browserName = "firefox")
remDr$open()

Answer 1

1. Download Docker at https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop

2. Run docker pull selenium/standalone-chrome-debug in terminal (or cmd for windows)

3. In Docker Desktop's Dashboard, go to the "images" tab on the left. After that, you should see something like this: Click Run

4. A popup will appear. There, click on "Optional Settings"

5. Type 4445 on Ports. Click on the "plus" sign, type 5901 on the other input that will be created on Ports. It should look like the image below. After that, click Run.

6. Now, if you click on the Containers / Apps tab on the left, there should be something like this:

7. In Rs console, go:

   install.packages("RSelenium")
   library(RSelenium)
   
   remDr <- remoteDriver(
           remoteServerAdd = "localhost",
           port = 4445L,
           browser = "chrome"
   )
   
   remDr$open()
   

Every time you want RSelenium to work you will need to run the Docker container as you did in steps 3 and 5 above.

The steps also allow you to use VNC to watch what happens and debug. If you need to learn a bit about it go to https://www.realvnc.com/pt/connect/download/viewer/ More details are out of the scope of this topic.

Well, I think this can take you to a point where you can now follow these instructions of RSelenium's basic usage vignette: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RSelenium/vignettes/basics.html

You should also read about security related to exposed ports and how to handle it. These videos from R Consortium may help you out from here on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxbvFiYxEzI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcIeWiljQG4

I hope it may help you as you would have helped me some time ago.