Selenium Web Browser in Google Colab

How to use Selenium Web Browser in Google Colab

I wrote this little manual because I faced problems before running Selenium in Google Colab.

The previous fix was not working anymore so I had to find another solution, updated at 09-06-2023

Installation of Selenium in Colab

The installation of Selenium with the Chrome Browser does not work out of the box.

Therefore I wrote some extra code to install Selenium on the Google Colab server so it works.

Go straight to the Google Colab file and clone it yourself or copy-paste the code below.

# FIX FOR CHROMIUM DRIVER NOT WORKING updated version on 9-6-2023

%%shell

sudo apt -y update

sudo apt install -y wget curl unzip

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/libu/libu2f-host/libu2f-udev_1.1.4-1_all.deb

dpkg -i libu2f-udev_1.1.4-1_all.deb

wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

CHROME_DRIVER_VERSION=`curl -sS chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/LATEST_RELEASE`

wget -N https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/$CHROME_DRIVER_VERSION/chromedriver_linux64.zip -P /tmp/

unzip -o /tmp/chromedriver_linux64.zip -d /tmp/

chmod +x /tmp/chromedriver

mv /tmp/chromedriver /usr/local/bin/chromedriver

pip install selenium

from selenium import webdriver

from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

from IPython.display import display, HTML, IFrame

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()

options.add_argument("--headless")

options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')

options.add_argument("--no-sandbox")

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)

service = Service(executable_path=r'/usr/local/bin/chromedriver')

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()

chrome_options.add_argument('--headless')

chrome_options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')

chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')

driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=service,options=chrome_options)

driver.get('https://www.bramtechtalk.com/')

display(HTML(driver.page_source))