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.)