Run Selenium from PyCharm

In order to run the Selenium WebDriver from within PyCharm, you need to explicitly add the path of the browser driver executable.

It is in fact not necessary to add the PyCharm Selenium plugin.

My PyTest fixture for the Selenium browser now looks like this:

from selenium import webdriver
import pytest

@pytest.fixture(scope="session")
def browser():
    browser = webdriver.PhantomJS(executable_path="/usr/local/bin/phantomjs",
                                  desired_capabilities={
                                  'phantomjs.page.settings.loadImages': 'false',
                                  })
    browser.implicitly_wait(3)

    yield browser

    browser.quit()

I’m using PhantomJS as a headless browser because it is way faster than Firefox or Chrome. I wish I could disable all loading of CSS files.

Update 2017-01-18

Putting the explicit path to the browser driver executable into the test fixture causes problems when I run the same test on Snap CI. A better solution is to add the directory of the (PhantomJS) executable into PyCharm itself.

In my PyCharm Community Edition 2016.2 I go to Run » Edit Configurations…, select the run configuration that runs my functional test and put

PATH=/usr/local/bin/

into Environment variabls. That’s all. Now PyCharm finds the executable of PhantomJS in that directory and I can remove the executable_path line from the fixture.

I do not know why PyCharm doesn’t just import the $PATH from my shell.