Is running Selenium on Google Colab possible?

Question

I'm having difficulty working with Selenium directly from Google Colab. Whenever I run the code below on my local machine I get success, however I would like to test the same application in Colab, but all the options I test I can't succeed.

import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore')
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.common.exceptions import InvalidSessionIdException
from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/gdrive', force_remount=True)

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled")
options.add_argument('--ignore-certificate-errors-spki-list')
options.add_argument('--ignore-ssl-errors')
options.add_experimental_option('excludeSwitches', ['enable-logging'])
options.add_experimental_option("prefs", {"profile.managed_default_content_settings.images": 2}) 
options.add_argument("--no-sandbox") 
options.add_argument("--disable-setuid-sandbox") 
options.add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-using") 
options.add_argument("--disable-extensions") 
options.add_argument("--disable-gpu") 
options.add_argument("start-maximized") 
options.add_argument("disable-infobars")
options.add_argument(r"user-data-dir=.\cookies\\test") 
options.binary_location = '/usr/bin/google-chrome'

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path='/usr/bin/chromedriver') #Error occurs in this function
driver.implicitly_wait(5)

print("Current session is {}".format(driver.session_id))

I also ran the following commands:

!apt-get update
!apt install chromium-chromedriver
!cp /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromedriver /usr/bin

After trying to run the code above, the following message appears:

**WebDriverException: Message: unknown error: no chrome binary at /usr/bin/google-chrome**

Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

Try removing this line

options.binary_location = '/usr/bin/google-chrome'

and see if it works with default binary location. Do not forget to install the driver

!apt-get update 
!apt install chromium-chromedriver

Answer 2

I create a library to help make it simple.

!pip install kora
from kora.selenium import wd  # web driver
print(wd.session_id)  # 8be87366df11b09b552fb4ad7efbd696