run Selenium Python Script with Headless Chrome

Installing Selenium and Webdriver for Python

We will use a virtual environment for running Python scripts. Follow the below steps to create Python virtual environment and install the required python modules.

1. Create a directory to store Python scripts. Then switch to the newly-created directory.

   mkdir tests && cd tests 
   

2. Set up the Python virtual environment and activate it.

   python3 -m venv venv 
   source venv/bin/activate 
   

 

Once the environment is activated, You will find the updated prompt as shown below screenshot:

Create Python Environment for Selenium on Ubuntu

Now use PIP to install the selenium and webdriver-manager Python modules under the virtual environment.

pip install selenium webdriver-manager  

 Installing Seleniu

 

 

Selenium Python Script with Headless Chrome

 

 Now, create a sample selenium script in Python that fetches the title of a website.

This script will run headless, So you can run it without an X desktop environment. You can simply SSH to your system and run the below example. Make sure Chromedriver is install in arm64 type. See my other blog

1. Create a Python script and edit it in your favorite text editor:

   nano test.py 
   

2. Copy-paste the following Selenium Python script to the file.

   ====

   from selenium import webdriver

   from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

   from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service

   #from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

    

   chrome_driver_path="/usr/bin/chromedriver"

   options = Options()

   options.add_argument('--headless')

   options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')

   options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')

   #driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()), options=options)

    

   driver= webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=chrome_driver_path, options=options)

   driver.get("https://python.org")

   print(driver.title)

   driver.close()

    ====
   

    

   Press CTRL + O to save content to file and press CTRL + X to close editor.

3. Now, run this Python script in a shell.

   python test.py 
   

   You will see the output something like below:
   

   

   Running the Selenium Python Script