Python – How to install firefoxdriver webdriver for python3 selenium on ubuntu 16.04

pythonpython-3.5python-3.xseleniumselenium-webdriver

I installed python3-selenium apt package on Ubuntu 16.04. While installing, got a message:

Suggested packages:
chromedriver firefoxdriver
The following NEW packages will be installed:
python3-selenium

When I try to run the following python code,

#! /usr/bin/python3.5
from selenium import webdriver
import time

def get_profile():
    profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
    profile.set_preference("browser.privatebrowsing.autostart", True)
    return profile

def main():
    browser = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=getProfile())

    #browser shall call the URL
    browser.get("http://www.google.com")
    time.sleep(5)
    browser.quit()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./test.py", line 19, in
main()
File "./test.py", line 11, in main
browser = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=getProfile())
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox /webdriver.py", line 77, in init
self.binary, timeout),
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/extension_connection.py", line 47, in init
self.profile.add_extension()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_profile.py", line 91, in add_extension
self._install_extension(extension)
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_profile.py", line 251, in _install_extension
compressed_file = zipfile.ZipFile(addon, 'r')
File "/usr/lib/python3.5/zipfile.py", line 1009, in init
self.fp = io.open(file, filemode)
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/usr/lib /firefoxdriver/webdriver.xpi'

I did searching for packages name firefoxdriver in Ubuntu repositories but none exist.
How do I solve this problem?

Any help with installing the webdrivers appreciated!

Best Answer

The package you are missing is called firefox-geckodriver. You can get it via sudo apt-get install firefox-geckodriver or by downloading from https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases, putting it into your $PATH (for example /usr/bin) and making it executable.

Python 2.7.9+ and 3.4+

Good news! Python 3.4 (released March 2014) and Python 2.7.9 (released December 2014) ship with Pip. This is the best feature of any Python release. It makes the community's wealth of libraries accessible to everyone. Newbies are no longer excluded from using community libraries by the prohibitive difficulty of setup. In shipping with a package manager, Python joins Ruby, Node.js, Haskell, Perl, Go—almost every other contemporary language with a majority open-source community. Thank you, Python.

If you do find that pip is not available when using Python 3.4+ or Python 2.7.9+, simply execute e.g.:

py -3 -m ensurepip

Of course, that doesn't mean Python packaging is problem solved. The experience remains frustrating. I discuss this in the Stack Overflow question Does Python have a package/module management system?.

And, alas for everyone using Python 2.7.8 or earlier (a sizable portion of the community). There's no plan to ship Pip to you. Manual instructions follow.

Python 2 ≤ 2.7.8 and Python 3 ≤ 3.3

Flying in the face of its 'batteries included' motto, Python ships without a package manager. To make matters worse, Pip was—until recently—ironically difficult to install.

Official instructions

Per https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/#do-i-need-to-install-pip:

Download get-pip.py, being careful to save it as a .py file rather than .txt. Then, run it from the command prompt:

python get-pip.py

You possibly need an administrator command prompt to do this. Follow Start a Command Prompt as an Administrator (Microsoft TechNet).

This installs the pip package, which (in Windows) contains ...\Scripts\pip.exe that path must be in PATH environment variable to use pip from the command line (see the second part of 'Alternative Instructions' for adding it to your PATH,

Alternative instructions

The official documentation tells users to install Pip and each of its dependencies from source. That's tedious for the experienced and prohibitively difficult for newbies.

For our sake, Christoph Gohlke prepares Windows installers (.msi) for popular Python packages. He builds installers for all Python versions, both 32 and 64 bit. You need to:

For me, this installed Pip at C:\Python27\Scripts\pip.exe. Find pip.exe on your computer, then add its folder (for example, C:\Python27\Scripts) to your path (Start / Edit environment variables). Now you should be able to run pip from the command line. Try installing a package:

pip install httpie

There you go (hopefully)! Solutions for common problems are given below:

Proxy problems

If you work in an office, you might be behind an HTTP proxy. If so, set the environment variables http_proxy and https_proxy. Most Python applications (and other free software) respect these. Example syntax:

http://proxy_url:port
http://username:password@proxy_url:port

If you're really unlucky, your proxy might be a Microsoft NTLM proxy. Free software can't cope. The only solution is to install a free software friendly proxy that forwards to the nasty proxy. http://cntlm.sourceforge.net/

Unable to find vcvarsall.bat

Python modules can be partly written in C or C++. Pip tries to compile from source. If you don't have a C/C++ compiler installed and configured, you'll see this cryptic error message.

Error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat

You can fix that by installing a C++ compiler such as MinGW or Visual C++. Microsoft actually ships one specifically for use with Python. Or try Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7.

Often though it's easier to check Christoph's site for your package.

Python – Selenium: FirefoxProfile exception Can’t load the profile

Update:

Selenium team fixed in latest version. For almost all environments the fix is:

pip install -U selenium

Unclear at which version it was fixed (apparently r13122), but certainly by 2.26.0 (current at time of update) it is fixed.

This error means that _wait_until_connectable is timing out, because for some reason, the code cannot connect to the webdriver extension that has been loaded into the firefox.

I have just reported an error to selenium where I am getting this error because I'm trying to use a proxy and only 2 of the 4 configured changes in the profile have been accepted by firefox, so the proxy isn't configured to talk to the extension. Not sure why this is happening...

https://github.com/seleniumhq/selenium-google-code-issue-archive/issues/2061