Selenium in Python on Mac - Geckodriver executable

Question

I'm new to programming and started with Python about 2 months ago and am going over Sweigart's Automate the Boring Stuff with Python text. I'm using Spyder 3 and already installed the selenium module and the Firefox browser. I used the following code in python file

from selenium import webdriver
browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('http://inventwithpython.com')

I get this error:

Message: 'geckodriver' executable needs to be in PATH.

I've downloaded geckodriver.exe in addition to going into terminal and installing it using

brew install geckodriver

Oddly enough, if I go into terminal and type "python" and then put the code in, it works, but not when I run the file in Spyder. Where do I need to put the geckodriver.exe file for it to work? I've tried putting it in various folders (same folder as the python file, same folder as the webdriver file, in the user bin, and so on) but I get the same error

I've looked at similar questions but can't seem to find something that works. I've also tried with Chrome but I get the same error but with chromedriver.

which geckodriver

yields /usr/local/bin/geckodriver

I'm also on a Mac, so file paths are a little more difficult for me than on windows.

Answer 1

Perhaps someone can explain why the path isn't found. And I also hope this helps someone else troubleshoot their own path issues.

You can certainly put the geckodriver executible anywhere you'd like. On my Mac, I chose ~/.local/bin since its a common place for executables to be stored that are specific to a user account. For example. the Heroku CLI is placed in ~/.local/share. This approach also eliminates the need for superuser access when adding an executable to a system location like /usr/local/bin

I then added it to the path within my .profile with

    EXPORT PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin

I tested by opening a terminal and checking with:

    geckodriver --version

which worked fine.

But from a Python virtual environment, for some reason, the system path isn't passed?? I discovered this by adding to my selenium test script:

    import sys

    for p in sys.path:
        print(p)

Which showed:

    /Users/philip/Devel/myproject
    /Users/philip/.virtualenvs/myproject/lib/python36.zip
    /Users/philip/.virtualenvs/myproject/lib/python3.6
    /Users/philip/.virtualenvs/myproject/lib/python3.6/lib-dynload
    /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.6/lib/python3.6
    /Users/philip/.virtualenvs/myproject/lib/python3.6/site-packages

So ultimately I had to specify the path with:

    self.browser = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path=r'/Users/philip/.local/bin/geckodriver')

This approach works fine, but I'd still like to know why I couldn't set the path in the virtual environment.

Answer 2

SOLVED: I placed the geckodriver exe in /Users/sethkillian/anaconda/bin and now it works from Spyder with no problem. Thanks for the help!

Answer 3

Download the geckodriver and put it in /usr/local/bin; then use webdriver.Firefox like this:

from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path = '/usr/local/bin/geckodriver')