Running Selenium WebDriver python bindings in chrome

I ran into a problem while working with Selenium. For my project, I have to use Chrome. However, I can't connect to that browser after launching it with Selenium.

For some reason, Selenium can't find Chrome by itself. This is what happens when I try to launch Chrome without including a path:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./obp_pb_get_csv.py", line 73, in <module>
    browser = webdriver.Chrome() # Get local session of chrome
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/chrome/webdriver.py", line 46, in __init__
    self.service.start()
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/chrome/service.py", line 58, in start
    and read up at http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/ChromeDriver")
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'ChromeDriver executable needs to be available in the path.                 Please download from http://code.google.com/p/selenium/downloads/list                and read up at http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/ChromeDriver'

To solve this problem, I then included the Chromium path in the code that launches Chrome. However, the interpreter fails to find a socket to connect to:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./obp_pb_get_csv.py", line 73, in <module>
    browser = webdriver.Chrome('/usr/bin/chromium') # Get local session of chrome
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/chrome/webdriver.py", line 46, in __init__
    self.service.start()
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/chrome/service.py", line 64, in start
    raise WebDriverException("Can not connect to the ChromeDriver")
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'Can not connect to the ChromeDriver'

I also tried solving the problem by launching chrome with:

chromium --remote-shell-port=9222

However, this did not work either.

PS. Here's some information about my system:

www-client: chromium 15.0.874.121  
dev-lang:   python 2.7.2-r3 Selenium 2.11.1  
OS:         GNU/Linux Gentoo Kernel 3.1.0-gentoo-r1

You need to make sure the standalone ChromeDriver binary (which is different than the Chrome browser binary) is either in your path or available in the webdriver.chrome.driver environment variable.

see http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/ChromeDriver for full information on how wire things up.

Edit:

Right, seems to be a bug in the Python bindings wrt reading the chromedriver binary from the path or the environment variable. Seems if chromedriver is not in your path you have to pass it in as an argument to the constructor.

import os
from selenium import webdriver

chromedriver = "/Users/adam/Downloads/chromedriver"
os.environ["webdriver.chrome.driver"] = chromedriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chromedriver)
driver.get("http://stackoverflow.com")
driver.quit()

For Linux

1. Check you have installed latest version of chrome brwoser-> chromium-browser -version

2. If not, install latest version of chrome sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

3. get appropriate version of chrome driver from here

4. Unzip the chromedriver.zip

5. Move the file to /usr/bin directory sudo mv chromedriver /usr/bin

6. Goto /usr/bin directory cd /usr/bin

7. Now, you would need to run something like sudo chmod a+x chromedriver to mark it executable.

8. finally you can execute the code.

   from selenium import webdriver
   
   driver = webdriver.Chrome()
   driver.get("http://www.google.com")
   print driver.page_source.encode('utf-8')
   driver.quit()
   

Mac OSX only

An easier way to get going (assuming you already have homebrew installed, which you should, if not, go do that first and let homebrew make your life better) is to just run the following command:

brew install chromedriver

That should put the chromedriver in your path and you should be all set.

For windows

Download ChromeDriver from this direct link OR get the latest version from this page.

Paste the chromedriver.exe file in your C:\Python27\Scripts folder.

This should work now:

from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()