Headless Browsing with Python 3 + MacOS Sierra
After trying for hours to find a way to automate browsing tasks with Python 3 on MacOS Sierra, I finally found the simplest way to do it.
Avoid PyQt
and PySide
at all costs, they are a nightmare to install.
Browser: Chrome
Use brew install chromedriver
to get a headless version of Chrome installed.
Interact with the browser via Selenium.
pip install selenium
should do the trick. And that’s it!
Try this hello world script:
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get('https://google.com')
assert 'Google' in self.driver.page_source
(I’m generously being supported this summer by a research grant from Columbia University. As such I’m writing a series of blog posts about my experience and interesting ideas that I come across in my field of research.)