Prerequisites

A browser is a must. One of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, Opera, IE, etc.
Driver for your browser.
- ChromeDriver
- geckodriver for Firefox
- and …

Further more, there are some nice tools such as webdriver-manager, chromedriver-autoinstaller and geckodriver-autoinstaller to check, download and install a suitable driver from python automatically.

Although WSL doesn’t support GUI directly, there are still ways to use WebDrivers/Selenium. Here is a proven method, https://github.com/lackovic/notes/tree/master/Windows/Windows%20Subsystem%20for%20Linux#use-chromedriver-on-wsl. In short, just place ChromeDriver in some system directory in windows for example C:\Windows\System32, and remove .exe extension. After that, your can use from wsl directly.

Common usages

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys #provide special keys in the keywords
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

#check ChromeDriver and open a new Chrome browser
browser = webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install())

#load Yahoo homepage
browser.get('http://www.yahoo.com')
assert 'Yahoo' in browser.title

#find the search box
elem = browser.find_element_by_name('p')

#input 'seleniumhq' and type 'ENTER'
elem.send_keys('seleniumhq' + Keys.RETURN)
#elem.send_keys('seleniumhq')
#elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

#close the browser
browser.quit()

ChromeOptions

selenium.webdriver.ChromeOptions() is equivalent to selenium.webdriver.chrome.options.Options().

#open a new ChromeOptions object
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()

#add agruments
options.add_argument('--headless')
options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')

#open a new Chrome browser
driver = Chrome(options=options)

Further more arguments for Chrome, go after here.

XPath

There is a fantastic blog to guide the usage of XPath. Click here

And you can test a XPath in Chrome Console. F12 –> Console –> Type your XPath like $x(“.//*[@id='id']”) –> ENTER.

Cases

submit the daily report to server, see source code.
require cookies from Google Earth Engine, see source code.

Reference

Python tools

Colon, double colon and ellipsis python

Ports of python geospatial analysis tools python

Add text or annotation into the axes in matplotlib python

Setup font size and other groups in matplotlib python

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