Monday, December 2, 2024

Install Selenium on Raspberry Pi Bookworm (HeadLess)

In this article, we will guide you through the process of installing Selenium on a Raspberry Pi running the Bookworm operating system in a headless configuration. This setup is particularly useful if you plan to operate the Raspberry Pi without a monitor. You might use

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

options = Options()
options.add_argument('--headless=new')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(CHROMEDRIVER_PATH, options=options)

as mentioned here. But some webserver blocks headless browser (mentioned here), so we need to come up with another solution in this tutorial for that.

Prerequisites:

Before you begin, ensure you meet the following prerequisites:

  • A Raspberry Pi with the Bookworm operating system installed
  • A stable internet connection
  • Basic knowledge of using the terminal

Steps:

1.) First, update your system to ensure all packages are up to date. Open the terminal and run the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y

2.) Selenium needs a browser and a a WebDriver to interact with the browser. In this example, we will use Chromium. To install it run:

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Once installed you can test if its running via:

chromium-browser --version

Which should output something like:

Chromium 129.0.6668.100 built on Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)

3.) After that we need to install a Chromium driver via

sudo apt install chromium-chromedriver

Once done you can check the result via:

chromedriver --version

4.) After that we can install selenium via:

sudo apt install python3-selenium

5.) After that we need to install the X Virtual Framebuffer via

sudo apt install xvfb

and

sudo apt install python3-xvfbwrapper

6.) Now we need a virtual display as our Pi is running headless. For that we will install pyvirtualdisplay via:

sudo apt install python3-pyvirtualdisplay

7.) Now we can test if it works. For the test we will create a small python script via:

sudo nano test-selenium-script.py

8.) once open copy the following inside the script:

from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
from selenium import webdriver

# define and start a virtual display
display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
display.start()

# start the Selenium WebDriver
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)

# Open a website
driver.get('http://www.google.com')
print(driver.title)

# clean up and close WebDriver and Display
driver.quit()
display.stop()

After that close nano and save the file

9.) Now we will run the script via:

sudo python test-selenium-script.py

Depending on your device it might take some time until it will show “Google”.

Conclusion:

By following these steps, you have successfully installed Selenium on your Raspberry Pi with Bookworm in a headless configuration. You can now perform automated tests and web scraping tasks on your Raspberry Pi.

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