As we all know, today automation testing is increasing exponentially and ruling the IT world. Today, every organization some or other way moving towards automation and that leads to an increase in demand for automation tools in the IT market. And one of such tools that have gained enormous popularity among the automation tester community is Selenium.

Selenium is rapidly emerging as one of the most widely used test automation tools. Gartner also reports that Selenium being an open-source automated testing tool has a high adoption rate.

Selenium was developed in 2004, by Jason Huggins, while testing an inside application (Time and Expenses (T&E) framework) at Thought Works.

Basically, selenium comes in 4 major flavors such as:

• Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
• Selenium RC (Remote Control) - DEPRECATED
• Selenium Webdriver
• Selenium Grid

But, here we will be mostly focusing on the Selenium web driver which is one of the most used and popular automation tools in IT industries.

So let get dive into setting up the selenium web driver on our system and write our very first automation script using Python.

Setting up Selenium on Windows/Mac/Linux

• Open terminal/CMD on your system and create a "Python virtual environment"

👉NOTE: We can directly install selenium at the system level but that's really not a good practice and also it may impact the existing project which is using the instance of python installed at the system level

• To create a python virtual environment, please refer - Setting up Python environment on your system
• Once we are done with virtual env setup, activate the virtual environment using:

  For windows user

  \env\Scripts\activate.bat

  For mac/Linux user

  source \env\bin\activate

• After activating virtual env, just cross-check whether you have expected Python version installed or not using- python --version
• Now, its time to install selenium and to do so we need to execute below command

pip install selenium

Downloading chromedriver for Windows/Mac/Linux

• Go to Selenium official website - https://www.selenium.dev/
• Download the respective browser driver from - https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/.Here, we will be working with chrome browser since we will be downloading chromedriver
• Extract the downloaded driver zip file and place the executable file chromedriver.exe (for Windows) & binary chromedriver (for Mac/Linux) file at your desired location from extracted zip folder

Writing our first Selenium automation script using Python

• Open any of the text editor "Sublime Text/ Atom/ VS Code"
• Open new file & add below line of code to it and save it with extension .py

                
                    from selenium import webdriver
                    driver = webdriver.Chrome("path_to_chromedriver")
                    driver.url("https://selenium.dev")
                
            

• Open the terminal and navigate to the folder where we have saved the file.
• Execute the code using python filename.py

👉NOTE: Make sure whatever set up we have done so far should be within virtual environment