This introduction should give you some hints about Python and Selenium WebDriver. I will use this in following tutorials as a base.

Preconditions

• Python installed
• pip (package manager) installed
• Editor or IDE installed

Preparation

As first step simply install or upgrade the Selenium package.

# install or upgrade selenium
$ pip install -U selenium

# get information about package
$ pip show selenium

This is a fairly simple process. After the successful command execution you will have the Selenium WebDriver client library on your machine with all that is needed to create automated scripts.

The first script

Now start using the unittest library. The script comments help to describe the code.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import unittest
from selenium import webdriver


class SearchContentOnWebsite(unittest.TestCase):
    """define a class that inherits the TestCase class"""

    def setUp(self):
        """perform some tasks at the start of each test"""
        # create a new Firefox session
        self.driver = webdriver.Firefox()
        # wait for a certain amount of time
        self.driver.implicitly_wait(30)
        # maximize browser window
        self.driver.maximize_window()
        # navigate to the start URL
        self.driver.get("http://softwaretester.info")

    def test_search_headline(self):
        """a very simple test case"""
        link_text = 'Modern Status Plugin'
        title = 'Jenkins - Modern Status Plugin | - Softwaretester -'
        # find a element with partial text
        elem = self.driver.find_element_by_partial_link_text(link_text)
        # click element
        elem.click()
        # assert that title have value
        assert title in self.driver.title

    def tearDown(self):
        """method to clean up any initialized values after the test"""
        # close the browser window
        self.driver.close()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    unittest.main(verbosity=2)

Run Test

To run the test simple call your script.

./my_first_test.py

# or
python my_first_test.py