Selenium-python, 50% easier.

Selenium's Python bindings are great for web automation. But they are too difficult to use:

• To identify elements on a web page, Selenium requires you to use HTML IDs such as myBtn, XPaths such as //button[text()="Some text"] or CSS selectors such as p.content. These do not just make your scripts hard to read, they also break easily when the web site changes.
• You need to manually download and manage the respective WebDrivers. So if you want to automate Chrome for instance, it's not enough to simply install Selenium. You are also forced to download ChromeDriver and place it on your PATH.
• Many Selenium scripts are unstable with respect to timing issues: By default, if you try to click on an element with Selenium and that element is not yet visible, your script fails. People try to fix this by adding sleep statements to their code. But they too often fail, and make your code less readable.
• Selenium does let you explicitly wait for certain conditions, such as an element to appear. However, its API for doing so is way too complex for such a simple and common task.
• You cannot interact with elements in nested iFrames unless you first instruct Selenium to "switch to" the respective iFrame. This makes working with iFrames in Selenium extremely (and unnecessarily) tedious.
• Similarly for popups and windows: Selenium often requires you to deal with arcane "window handles" to switch between windows.

Helium wraps around Selenium to offer a more high-level API that solves all of the above problems. As a result, Helium scripts are typically 50% shorter, easier to read and more stable than corresponding Selenium scripts.

At the same, because Helium is merely a wrapper around Selenium, you can freely mix the two libraries. For example:

# A Helium function:
driver = start_chrome()
# A Selenium API:
driver.execute_script("alert('Hi!');")

So in other words, you don't lose anything by using Helium over Selenium alone.

Installation

To get started with Helium, you need Python 3 and Chrome or Firefox.

If you already know Python, then the following command should be all you need:

pip install helium

Otherwise - Hi! I would recommend you create a virtual environment in the current directory. Any libraries you download (such as Helium) will be placed there. Enter the following into a command prompt:

python3 -m venv venv

This creates a virtual environment in the venv directory. To activate it:

# On Mac/Linux:
source venv/bin/activate
# On Windows:
call venv\scripts\activate.bat

Then, install Helium using pip:

python -m pip install helium

Now enter python into the command prompt and (for instance) the commands at the top of this page (from helium import *, ...).

Your first script

I've compiled a cheatsheet that quickly teaches you all you need to know to be productive with Helium.

API Documentation

If you use an IDE such as PyCharm, you should get auto-completion and documentation for Helium's various functions. Otherwise, please look at this Python file. It lists all of Helium's public functions. I have not yet had time to bring this into a more readable state, sorry.

Status of this project

I have too little spare time to maintain this project for free. If you'd like my help, please go to my web site to ask about my consulting rates. Otherwise, unless it is very easy for me, I will usually not respond to emails or issues on the issue tracker. I will however accept and merge PRs. So if you add some functionality to Helium that may be useful for others, do share it with us by creating a Pull Request. For instructions, please see below.

Contributing

Pull Requests are very welcome. Please follow the same coding conventions as the rest of the code, in particular the use of tabs over spaces.

Before you submit a PR, ensure that the tests still work:

python setup.py test

This runs the tests against Chrome. To run them against Firefox, set the environment variable TEST_BROWSER to firefox. Eg. on Mac/Linux:

TEST_BROWSER=firefox python setup.py test

On Windows:

set TEST_BROWSER=firefox
python setup.py test

If you do add new functionality, you should also add tests for it. Please see the tests/ directory for what this might look like.

History

I (Michael Herrmann) originally developed Helium in 2013 for a Polish IT startup called BugFree software. (It could be that you have seen Helium before at https://heliumhq.com.) We shut down the company at the end of 2019 and I felt it would be a shame if Helium simply disappeared from the face of the earth. So I invested some time to modernize it and bring it into a state suitable for open source.

Helium used to be available for both Java and Python. But I because I now only use it from Python, I didn't have time to bring the Java implementation up to speed as well. Similarly for Internet Explorer: Helium used to support it, but since I have no need for it, I removed the (probably broken) old implementation.