In recent days selenium is the most loved tool for both the developers and the testers across the globe. When it comes to the automating tests on web browser interactions selenium python is very useful and it proves to be an intelligent tool. But the main point here to notice is why selenium turns out to be the user’s first choice when there are several options and tools available in the market. To know in deep about this, read this page completely.
What is selenium?
Many of them know selenium for several reasons because it is very popular. For the one who doesn’t know, selenium is an open-source automation testing tool. It can support different web browsers on different operating systems in a variety of programming languages and frameworks.
Some of the main advantages of selenium are listed out here,
- With the other third-party tools, selenium provides reusability and integration.
- This one requires very minimal hardware usage when compared with the other tools
- When compared to the other automation testing tools selenium is very easy to learn and use. When you visit the website of selenium you will be able to see a lot of documentation and all these are very helpful in writing automation test scripts.
- As it has its community it provides constant updates and also various programming languages can be used with selenium.
Why selenium webdriver?
Before knowing why selenium webdriver you have to know what selenium webdriver is and how it is different from that of selenium. There is not a very big difference between the selenium and the selenium webdriver. The selenium webdriver is an open-source collection of the APIs. This is used for testing the web applications and to verify that it works as expected or not. Most of the common programming languages are supported by the webdriver and this enables you to use a programming language in creating your test scripts that are not possible with the selenium IDE.
This is something very interesting where it packs a vast number of features that allows the users to automate browser interactions. They can do this just as if they were interacting with the web page themselves. This is extremely versatile and can be combined up with many frameworks, libraries and even the scripting languages.
Selenium webdriver should be your first choice
The selenium webdriver is different from the other versions of selenium. Some of the benefits of automation testing with the selenium webdriver are discussed below.
- Open-source
The major benefit is that the selenium webdriver is open source. This tends to provide all the features of QTP and is completely free of cost. This can be downloaded directly from the site and the support for the tool is also available.
- Leveraging the code
Another major benefit is it provides the advantage of speeding up the test cycles by leveraging the development code. With this, the testers can utilize the language used by the developers.
- Server starting not required
In this, you don’t need to start any server before testing. The commands are interpreted directly into the web services and the remote driver will receive them via an HTTP request. This can be then executed into the browser and consequently sending the response.
Why incorporate python with selenium webDriver?
The selenium webdriver using python is very good and this combination facilitates a wide range of testing. The popularity of Python has grown exponentially in the past decade. This is because it is a great language for the beginners which have simple syntax and its core tries to promote clean and readable code. When it comes to the python it has a rich library of available packages and is hugely supportive and is an active community. For all these reasons python is a great choice for automation testing.
The selenium webdriver and the python combination easily automate the web or user interface or mobile apps. With this, it is easy to move to the behaviour driven development or the test-driven development testing approach and many more features. This runs faster when compared to other programming languages
These days it has been used in many companies to develop the tools, software and the APIs.
Installing Python in windows
So till now, you would have seen why to choose python over the other programming languages. It is time to get started with the installation of python in the window. To install python you have to use 3.8.2 and also you have to be able to follow along with any 3.X version too. If you are having Mac then you may find python already installed. If you find it has not been installed then you can download and install it. Once you have installed you can check whether it works or not.
Installing selenium webdriver
It would be hard for one to work without knowing something about selenium webdriver. This is a great addition to the testers. It provides many advantages and the initial setup is user friendly.
Right now you have seen about the installation of python. Now it is time to go ahead and install selenium. For the demo, you can install it globally on your system. To go ahead with the procedure you can use PIP, and the python package management system and using all this will not be simpler. You would have to see the output and your output will tell you whether it is installed and is ready to use or not.
Drivers
Once you have done with the selenium you need to set up the driver. This is because drivers are required to allow selenium webdriver to initiate and interact with the browser instance. Each browser will have its driver. Make sure you check the browser version and download the right driver according to you.
Once you have downloaded it you have to unzip the driver and copy it to a folder in your system and make sure you save it. Also, you have to add the driver’s location to the systems PATH variable before you start writing the tests.
Final thoughts:Therefore selenium is one of the widely used tools that offers plenty of functions and will have control of overall major web browsers. This is mainly used in the testing and automation for the production or integration environment and can be used as a web scraper. Make sure you learn this selenium python tutorial and get to know more about this.