Setup selenium with chrome driver on ubuntu/debian

• Setting up and running Chrome and Selenium on the ubuntu or debian
• The guide is based on ubuntu 22.04
• LastModified: June 4, 2024

# cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=22.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=jammy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS"

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Table of Contents

• Step 1: Update the all packages, If necessary
• Step 2: Download google-chrome stable package
• Step 3: Install google-chrome
• (Optional) If you have a dependency problem after step 3, running the following command then try again step 3
• Step 4: Check Installed google-chrome version
• Step 5: Install selenium, webdriver-manager
• Step 6: Create hello_world
• Step 7: Run test.py and check google-chrome is available
• Step 8: That's All. Enjoy it.:)
• FAQ :)
  • 1. My VM is running in a cloud environment. In this case, how should I use Chrome?
  • 2. I wrote a Python script using Chrome and Selenium, and scheduled it with crontab, but cron is not working correctly. What should I do?
  • 3. The reason for the different ways of loading ChromeDriver is as follows, for example, what are the differences between (1) and (2)?
  • 4. google-chrome has been updated. Where can I download ChromeDriver and how do I install it?
    • 4.1. Go to the Chrome Driver Download page.
    • 4.2. Download the ChromeDriver.
    • 4.3. Install the ChromeDriver.
    • 4.4. Example Usage in Python:
  • 5. How can i prevent google-chrome package from auto-updating on Ubuntu?

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Step 1: update the all packages, If necessary

# apt update
# apt upgrade

Step 2: Download 'google-chrome' stable package

# wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

Step 3: Install 'google-chrome'

# apt-get install -y ./google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

Step 4: Check installed 'google-chrome' version

# google-chrome --version
Google Chrome 123.0.6312.86

Step 5: Install selenium, webdriver-manager

• https://pypi.org/project/webdriver-manager/

# pip3 install selenium
# pip3 install webdriver-manager

Step 6: create hello_world

• Run with Chrome Headless

# vim test.py
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

options = Options()
options.add_argument('--headless')
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()), options=options)

driver.get("https://python.org")
print(driver.title)
driver.close()

• Run with Chrome GUI

# vim test.py
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

options = Options()
# options.add_argument('--headless')
# options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()), options=options)

driver.get("https://python.org")
print(driver.title)
driver.close()

Step 7: Run test.py and check 'google-chrome' is available

# python3 test.py
Welcome to Python.org

Step 8: That's All. Enjoy it:)

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FAQ :)

1. My VM is running in a cloud environment. In this case, how should I use Chrome?

• In a cloud environment, people usually use Chrome in headless mode.
• In other words, in a cloud environment, VMs may not support display mode, especially free VMs(free tiers).
• However, if your VMs supports X-windows or display, you can also use GUI mode

2. I wrote a Python script using Chrome and Selenium, and scheduled it with crontab, but cron is not working correctly. What should I do?

• many of search results it appears that you need to specify the display mode as 0 in your script when running it through cron.
• Like this:)

*/1 * * * * export DISPLAY=:0; python ~/selenium_script.py

• However, typical VMs running Chrome execute in headless mode, where display settings are not relevant.
• The issue may be that when execute cronjob cron does not have the chromedriver path in cron's path.
• so you have to specify the chromedriver path in cron or your launcher(script).
• If you don't know the path to chromedriver, you can find it using the following command (or by setting WDM_LOG mode):

# find / -name "chromedriver"
/root/.cache/selenium/chromedriver
/root/.cache/selenium/chromedriver/linux64/117.0.5938.92/chromedriver
/root/.wdm/drivers/chromedriver
/root/.wdm/drivers/chromedriver/linux64/117.0.5938.92/chromedriver-linux64/chromedriver

• Afterward, you can set the path in crontab and execute it, like this:)

*/05 * * * * export PATH=$PATH:/root/.wdm/drivers/chromedriver/linux64/117.0.5938.92/chromedriver-linux64/chromedriver; root /data/test.py

Or, you can create a Bash script that loads the Python script and specifies the path:

# vim test_loader.sh

#!/bin/bash

export PATH=$PATH:/root/.wdm/drivers/chromedriver/linux64/117.0.5938.92/chromedriver-linux64/chromedriver
...
...
python3 test.py

3. The reason for the different ways of loading ChromeDriver is as follows, for example, what are the differences between (1) and (2)?

(1)
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome('/home/user/drivers/chromedriver')


(2)
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service as ChromeService
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=ChromeService(ChromeDriverManager().install()))

• (1) Loads chromedriver using Selenium's webdriver. In this case, You need to download the chromedriver binary, unzip it somewhere on your PC and set the path to this driver.(Compatible with Selenium 4.x and below.)
• (2) Runs Chrome using webdriver-manager. When you use webdriver-manager package, there is no need to download the chromedriver binary separately.

Install manager:

pip install webdriver-manager

Use with Chrome

selenium 3

from selenium import webdriver
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

driver = webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install())

selenium 4

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service as ChromeService
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=ChromeService(ChromeDriverManager().install()))

• For more details, refer to https://pypi.org/project/webdriver-manager/.

4. google-chrome has been updated. Where can I download ChromeDriver and how do I install it?

• June 4, 2024 the latest version of Chrome is "125.0.6422.142"

4.1. Go to the ChromeDriver Download page.

• Download the Chrome Driver with the same version as your updated Chrome.
• Click the link on the Chrome for Testing availability dashboard: https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads
• https://googlechromelabs.github.io/chrome-for-testing/ to find the Chrome Driver matching your updated Chrome version.

4.2. Download the ChromeDriver.

• Download the Chrome Driver version that matches your Chrome.
• https://googlechromelabs.github.io/chrome-for-testing/

For Mac M1, download mac-arm64.
- For Chrome version: https://storage.googleapis.com/chrome-for-testing-public/125.0.6422.141/mac-arm64/chromedriver-mac-arm64.zip

For General Linux distributions, download linux64.
- For Chrome version: https://storage.googleapis.com/chrome-for-testing-public/125.0.6422.141/linux64/chromedriver-linux64.zip

4.3. Install the ChromeDriver.

• Since Chrome Driver is a binary file, there is no separate installation process.
• Extract the zip archive and copy the chromedriver file to the directory where Chrome Driver should be located.

For Mac, the default location for chromedriver is /usr/local/bin.

% sw_vers
ProductName:    macOS
ProductVersion:   13.0
BuildVersion:   22A380

% ls -al /usr/local/bin/chromedriver
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  17314928 Mar 25 13:23 /usr/local/bin/chromedriver

If you want to place it in a custom directory:

• Place the 'chromedriver' file in your desired location. For example: '/Users/mymac/data/chromedrv/chromedriver'.

4.4. Example Usage in Python:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service

def chrome_webdriver():
 chromedriver_path = '/Users/mymac/data/chromedrv/chromedriver'
 user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) ' \
              'Chrome/123.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'
 options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
 options.add_argument("--start-maximized")
 options.add_argument('--headless')
 options.add_argument(f'user-agent={user_agent}')
 service = Service(executable_path=chromedriver_path)
 driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=service, options=options)
 return driver

url = 'http://www.google.com'
driver = chrome_webdriver()
driver.get(url)
driver.implicitly_wait(10)
print(driver.page_source)

5. How can i prevent 'google-chrome' package from auto-updating on Ubuntu?

• To prevent Google Chrome from auto-updating on Ubuntu, you can use package pinning or apt-mark to hold the Chrome package. However, this is generally not recommended
• Keep in mind that disabling Chrome's auto-updates can compromise security. It's generally recommended to manage updates properly for security and functionality benefits.

Using apt-mark:

• Hold the package to prevent updates:

# apt-mark hold google-chrome-stable
google-chrome-stable set on hold.

• To allow updates again, release the hold:

# apt-mark unhold google-chrome-stable
Canceled hold on google-chrome-stable.