Unable to load Atom ''find_element"

Question

I have recently installed PhantomJS and encountered this error on my first run:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()
driver.get("http://www.google.com")
driver.find_element_by_id('some_element').send_keys('something' + Keys.RETURN)

This code works with Firefox webdriver but does not work with PhantomJS. I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<PATHTOFILE>", line 20, in <module>
    driver.find_element_by_id('lst-ib').send_keys('something' + Keys.RETURN)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 266, in find_element_by_id
    return self.find_element(by=By.ID, value=id_)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 744, in find_element
    {'using': by, 'value': value})['value']
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 233, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 165, in check_response
    raise exception_class(value)
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: Error - Unable to load Atom 'find_element' from file ':/ghostdriver/./third_party/webdriver-atoms/find_element.js'

Answer 1

The reason is that I used apt-get install Phantomjs to install it, but it seems that it is a not full-functional Phantomjs version installed by apt-get. So, download manually from the Phantomjs website and add the containing direction to the PATH environment variable.

Answer 2

These are the precise steps that worked for me:

1. Purge old phantomjs
   apt purge phantomjs

2. Wget the latest phantomjs (as per http://phantomjs.org/download.html)
   wget https://bitbucket.org/ariya/phantomjs/downloads/phantomjs-2.1.1-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2

3. Untar it
   tar xvjf phantomjs-2.1.1-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2

4. Moved the phantomjs executable to /usr/bin/ (may need sudo)
   cp phantomjs-2.1.1-linux-x86_64/bin/phantomjs /usr/bin/

Answer 3

For me it start to work after

apt install nodejs-legacy # just an alias node/nodejs to make npm install work
apt purge phantomjs       # optionaly
npm install -g phantomjs  # most important part because apt installation failed for me