Python Bindings

Introduction

The python bindings for Selenium 2 are now available. The bindings include the full functionality of Selenium 1 and 2 (WebDriver). The package currently supports the Remote, Firefox, Chrome and IE protocols natively.

note : Currently Selenium only supports Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3

If using selenium 1, before attempting to run a test, be sure to download the Selenium Server jar file, and run it via

java -jar selenium-server-standalone.jar

in your terminal/cmd prompt, before attempting to run a test. Selenium 2 however, does not require the jar file.

Installation

Currently, there are two versions of Selenium available for use.

Latest Official Release

The first version, is the latest official release, which is available on the Python Package Index http://python.org/pypi/selenium. To use this version, in your terminal type:

[sudo] easy_install selenium or [sudo] pip install selenium

Development Version

The second version, is the current code from trunk. To use this, checkout the trunk repository at https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium. After the download is completed, cd to the root of the downloaded directory via terminal/cmd prompt. Perform the following commands:

./go py_prep_for_install_release
python setup.py install

Upon completion, the package should be installed successfully.

One advantage of using trunk as of writing, is the reorganization of the package. Previously, to initialize a browser you had to perform,

from selenium.firefox.webdriver import WebDriver
driver = WebDriver()

This has been changed, so now all that is required is:

from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Firefox()

Testing Source

When developing Selenium, it is recommended you run the tests before and after making any changes to the code base. To perform these tests, you will first need to install Tox.

By default, running tox will attempt to execute all of the defined environments. This means the tests for python 2.7 and 3.5 will run for each of the supported drivers. This is most likely not what you want, as some drivers will not run on certain platforms. It is therefore recommended that you specify the environments you wish to execute. To list all environments available, run tox -l, and to execute a single environment, use tox -e.

As an example, this command will run the tests for Firefox against python 2.7:

tox -e py27-firefox

The tests are executed using pytest, and you can pass positional arguments through Tox by specifying -- before them. In addition to other things, this allows you to filter tests. For example, to run a single test file:

tox -e py27-firefox -- py/test/selenium/webdriver/common/visibility_tests.py

To run a single test, you can use the keyword filter, such as:

tox -e py27-firefox -- -k testShouldShowElementNotVisibleWithHiddenAttribute

Usage

Depending on the driver you wish to utilize, importing the module is performed by entering the following in your python shell:

Selenium 1:

from selenium import selenium

Selenium 2:

from selenium import webdriver

API Documentation / Viewing Available Functionality

To read the API documentation of the Python Bindings go to the Python bindings API doc page.

Alternatively use your python shell to view all commands available to you, after importing perform:

Selenium 1:

dir(selenium)

Selenium 2:

dir(webdriver)

To view the docstrings (documentation text attached to a function or method), perform

print('functionname'.__doc__)

where functionname is the function you wish to view more information on. For example,

print(selenium.open.__doc__)

Comparison with Java Bindings

Here is a summary of the major differences between the python and Java bindings.

Function Names

Function names separate compound terms with underscores, rather than using Java's camelCase formatting. For example, in python title is the equivalent of getTitle() in Java.

Flatter Structures

To reflect pythonic behavior of flat object hierarchies the python bindings e.g. find_element_by_xpath("//h1") rather than findElement(By.xpath("//h1")); but it does give you the freedom of doing find_element(by=By.XPATH, value='//h1')

Browser Support

All of the browsers supported by the Java implementation of Selenium are available in the Python bindings. For example:

Selenium 1 - Internet Explorer

from selenium import selenium
selenium = selenium("localhost", 4444, "*iexplore", "http://google.com/")
selenium.start()

Selenium 1 - Firefox

from selenium import selenium
selenium = selenium("localhost", 4444, "*firefox", "http://google.com/")
selenium.start()

Selenium 2 - Firefox

from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Firefox()

Selenium 2 - Chrome

from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

Selenium 2 - Remote

from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Remote(browser_name="firefox", platform="any")

Selenium 2 - IE

from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Ie()