How can I use Python's webbrowser.get within a docker container

Question

So I have been trying to use webbrowser.get from within my Docker container but it is failing to find a browser to launch.

I believe there are two ways to do this:

• mount the location of my current browser within my container and point the environment variable BROWSER at it
• download a browser within my container and use that

So far I've been trying to go with the ladder because I think its more full-proof when handing my Dockerfile over to others.

This is what I have so far but it continues not to find the browser:

# set base image (host OS)
FROM python:3.8

ENV CHROME_VERSION "google-chrome-stable"
RUN sed -i -- 's&deb http://deb.debian.org/debian jessie-updates main&#deb http://deb.debian.org/debian jessie-updates main&g' /etc/apt/sources.list \
  && apt-get update && apt-get install wget -y
ENV CHROME_VERSION "google-chrome-stable"
RUN wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add - \
  && echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list \
  && apt-get update && apt-get -qqy install ${CHROME_VERSION:-google-chrome-stable}

RUN set -eux \
  ; . /root/.bashrc

Then I just try running docker exec -it [container id] python and running the code import webbrowser; webbrowser.get('http://google.com') import webbrowser; webbrowser.get('http://google.com') but it just continues to return False and not open a browser.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Have you tried webbrowser.get() to get the browser, or even simply webbrowser.open("http://example.com") to use the default browser? If that still won't work, that would be a different question anyway. Your current usage messed up with the 2 different APIs.