How to open Firefox browser in selenium Python
In this article, we are going to learn how to open a Firefox browser in selenium python. To execute the test script we need to launch the firefox browser window. The web browser Mozilla Firefox uses an engine named the Gecko browser engine. The engine was created by the Mozilla foundation. GeckoDriver is what is between Selenium and the Firefox browser. It lets us control the Firefox web browser from Python code. All web browser commands go through the GeckoDriver, the GeckoDriver in turn makes your browser do what you want.
The GeckoDriver is a different executable on every operating system. On Windows it is GeckoDriver.exe, but on Mac, there are no .exe files, so it’s named differently.The GeckoDriver must match the Firefox version, otherwise, you can get incompatibility issues or have the issue that it simply doesn’t work. By the end of this article, you will be able to answer the below questions.
- How to open/launch/invoke firefox in selenium python.
- How to open headless firefox browser in selenium python
How to open/launch firefox in selenium python
Open Mozilla Firefox browser and type in the address bar Firefox://version/ to check browser version to download the compatible version firefox Web driver as per Browser version.
- DownloadFirefoxdriver from the official website. .
- unzip and copy geckodriver.exeto the python script directory location.
- The path of the python script directory for Us is” C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Local \Programs \Python \Python310\Scripts”. It can be different depending on what location we have chosen while installing python.
- Run the below code to automatically open the Firefox web browser.
pip install webdriver-manager
from selenium import webdriver from webdriver_manager.firefox import GeckoDriverManager driver = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path=GeckoDriverManager().install()) driver.maximize_window() driver.get("https://google.com") print('driver Title:',driver.title) print('Driver name:',driver.name) print('Driver URL:',driver.current_url) driver.quit() Installing the Firefox web driver on Linux for selenium
Go to https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases and scroll down to assets. There you will find the gecko driver for the different operating systems.
Click on «geckodriver-v0.27.0-linux64.tar.gz» to download the Linux 64bit driver. Choose the directory where you want to save the zipped file and start the download.
Understanding the PATH environmental variable
In order for selenium to execute the webdriver successfully, it needs to know where the executable file “geckodriver” is located. To accomplish this there is an environmental variable called PATH in which your program looks for the address of executable files.
PATH is an environmental variable in Linux that tells the shell in which directories to search for executable files in response to commands given through the command line or shell scripts. This is also the reason you can type a command like ls (list) without having to specify its directory /bin/ls .
PATH (upper case letters) is different from path (lower case letters) where the latter refers to the address of a file or directory. ie. /home/user/file.txt
Next, I will explain two ways that you can set up the webdriver to work with the PATH variable. The first is a permanent solution where you place the executable within a directory already in the PATH variable. The second is a temporary solution where you add the directory of the webdriver executable to the PATH variable. With the latter, the PATH resets when a new session is started.
Unzip to the directory in PATH
The easiest method is to unzip the geckodriver.tar into the /usr/local/bin directory, which is already in the PATH by default. To achieve this enter the following command into your command line from within the directory where the geckodriver.tar file is located. Note the name of your file should match that of which you downloaded.
tar -C /usr/local/bin/ -xvf geckodriver-v0.27.0-linux64.tar This places an unzipped copy within the /usr/local/bin folder that is already listed in the PATH variable. You will now be able to run the geckodriver command to test it out.
This change will remain in place even after the session is restarted.
Add the chosen geckodriver directory to PATH
To temporarily add the geckodriver, add the directory where the geckodriver executable is located to the PATH variable. Enter the following command where YourDirectory is the directory of the geckodriver executable:
This adds the directory where the executable is located to the PATH variable. You can check this by looking at the PATH variable values. Enter the following command:
This will show all the directories that are currently listed within the PATH variable separated by semicolons. You will now also see your geckodriver directory listed there and will be able to run the geckodriver command to test it out.
Open a web page with Python
Now you will be able to use selenium from within Python. You can test it out by opening a web page from the interactive Python shell. Type python3 to open the python interactive shell then enter the following commands:
>>> from selenium import webdriver >>> browser = webdriver.Firefox() >>> browser.get('https://beginnerpythonprojects.com/')