How to install Selenium (python) on a Apache Web Server?

Question

I have up and running an Apache Server with Python 3.x installed already on it. Right now I am trying to run ON the server a little python program (let's say filename.py). But this python program uses the webdriver for Chrome from Selenium. Also it uses sleep from time (but I think this comes by default, so I figure it won't be a problem)

from selenium import webdriver

When I code this program for the first time on my computer, not only I had to write the line of code above but also to manually download the webdriver for Chrome and paste it on /usr/local/bin. Here is the link to the file in case you wonder: Webdriver for Chorme

Anyway, I do not know what the equivalences are to configure this on my server. Do you have any idea how to do it? Or any concepts I could learn related to installing packages on an Apache Server?

Answer 1

Simple solution:

You don't need to install the driver in usr/local/bin . You can have the.exe anywhere and you can specify that with an executable path, see here for an example.

Solution for running on a server

If you have python installed on the server, ideally >3.4 which comes with pip as default. Then install ChromeDriver on a standalone server, follow the instructions here

Note that, Selenium always need an instance of a browser to control.

Luckily, there are browsers out there that aren't that heavy as the usual browsers you know. You don't have to open IE / Firefox / Chrome / Opera. You can use HtmlUnitDriver which controls HTMLUnit - a headless Java browser that does not have any UI. Or a PhantomJsDriver which drives PhantomJS - another headless browser running on WebKit.

Those headless browsers are much less memory-heavy, usually are faster (since they don't have to render anything), they don't require a graphical interface to be available for the computer they run at and are therefore easily usable server-side.

Sample code of headless setup

op = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
op.add_argument('headless')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=op)

It's also worth reading on running Selenium RC, see here on that.