I recently got Selenium, Google Chrome, and ChromeDriver installed and working on a DigitalOcean instance running 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04. Here’s how:
First, install Google Chrome for Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install libxss1 libappindicator1 libindicator7
wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome*.deb
sudo apt-get install -f
Now, let’s install xvfb so we can run Chrome headlessly:
sudo apt-get install xvfb
Install ChromeDriver:1
sudo apt-get install unzip
wget -N http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/2.20/chromedriver_linux64.zip
unzip chromedriver_linux64.zip
chmod +x chromedriver
sudo mv -f chromedriver /usr/local/share/chromedriver
sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/chromedriver /usr/local/bin/chromedriver
sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/chromedriver /usr/bin/chromedriver
Install some Python dependencies for Selenium:
sudo apt-get install python-pip
## (Optional) Create and enter a virtual environment:
# sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv
# virtualenv env
# source env/bin/activate
pip install pyvirtualdisplay selenium
Now, we can do stuff like this with Selenium in Python:
from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
from selenium import webdriver
display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
display.start()
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get('http://christopher.su')
print driver.title
Footnotes
1: You can find all the ChromeDriver releases here. If you’re using a 32-bit system or a non-Linux OS, the ChromeDriver download used above won’t work.