Installing Selenium on Ubuntu 20.04

Selenium is a popular open-source framework for automating web browsers. It allows developers to write automated tests in various programming languages such as Python, Java, C#, and more. Selenium provides a robust set of tools and APIs to interact with web elements, perform actions, and validate expected outcomes, making it a powerful tool for web testing and browser automation.

Installation Steps:

1. Open a terminal on your Ubuntu 20.04 system.
2. Make sure you have Python installed by running the command: python3 --version
3. Install pip, the package manager for Python, with the command: sudo apt install python3-pip
4. Install Selenium using pip: pip3 install selenium
5. Install the appropriate web driver for the browser you want to automate. Selenium requires a separate web driver executable to interface with the browser. For example, if you want to automate Chrome, you need to install the ChromeDriver.
   • For Chrome, download the latest ChromeDriver executable from the official website: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/
   • Extract the downloaded file and copy the executable to a location in your system's PATH.

Verifying the Installation:

You can verify the installation of Selenium and the web driver by running a simple test script. Create a new Python file with the following code:

from selenium import webdriver

# Instantiate a web driver (e.g., for Chrome)
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

# Open a website
driver.get("https://www.example.com")

# Print the page title
print(driver.title)

# Close the browser
driver.quit()

Save the file with a .py extension (e.g., test.py) and run it using the command: python3 test.py

If everything is set up correctly, you should see the page title of the website you opened printed in the terminal.

Conclusion:

By following the steps outlined above, you should now have Selenium installed on your Ubuntu 20.04 system. You can use Selenium and its web driver to automate browser tasks, perform web testing, or scrape web data, depending on your requirements.