Installation¶

Selenate has dependencies on selenium, so at this point you should have installed selenate which in turn would have installed selenium. But if you haven’t yet done that the command to install selenate is:

pip install -U selenate

and if for whatever reason this doesn’t install selenium as well that command similarily follows as

pip install -U selenium

Browser¶

Currently selenate only supports firefox so please ensure that you have the most recent version of the browser installed.

Selenium Server¶

Selenium requires there to be a Selenium Server running in order to interact with a browser. The server used to be hosted at google code, but has since changed and is now found at googleapis.com. So to download the server navigate there, find the newest version which at the time of writing is 2.41 and download the file known as selenium-server-standalone-2.41.0.jar. Selenate includes automatic management of this server for you if you download this file under the name selenium-server.jar and store it in the same directory as your project files.

Now normally you would have to start the selenium server with something like:

java -jar selenium-server.jar

and you should try running this regardless to check that everything is working. Though for future runs Selenate will handle starting and stoppind this whenever you run a script, this is done in the declaration of the Selenate object

browser = Selenate()

Selenate¶

It’s very easy to start a browser instance. First import selenate:

from selenate import selenate

Then start your browser:

browser = selenate()

In the background Selenate will check whether or not you have a selenium server running, and start one if you haven’t. Then it will create a fresh session of firefox.

Selenate Objects¶

A selenate object is the current browser instance and contains everything required to begin automation.

Constructor:

class Selenate.(host, server)

The host and server variables are assumed to be strings and neither are required variables..

the host value defaults to “127.0.0.1” and can be changed to a proxy if needed.
The server value defaults to ”./selenium-server.jar” and should be changed to wherever the selenium server file is located or False if this is being handled elsewhere

Class methods:

classmethod Selenate. get (url)

url is a strong which is a valid url for the browser to go to.

classmethod Selenate. find_element_by_locator (locator)

locator is a string in the format “type=locator” where type is one of the following: ‘css’, ‘class’ or ‘id’. locator may also just be a css identifier. This function will return an object of the Selenate Element class. The use of this class is explained in the Selenate Element Documentation For example:

browser = Selenate()
browser.get("http://www.github.com/wmak/selenate")
icon = browser.find_element_by_locator("css=.mega-octicon")
icon = browser.find_element_by_locator(".mega-octicon")

classmethod Selenate. click (locator)

locator should be formatted exactly as seen from find_element_by_locator this will cause Selenate to click the element described by locator.

classmethod Selenate. type_to (locator, text)

locator should be formatted exactly as seen from find_element_by_locator text is a string. This will cause selenate to enter text into the element described by locator

classmethod Selenate. quit ()

Closes the Selenate browser, and if Selenate was in charge of the selenium server kills that as well.