Python Script

Automate Any Website with Selenium

In 2025, the ability to automate interactions with the web is no longer a niche skill—it's a superpower. From quality assurance engineers building robust end-to-end testing pipelines to data scientists scraping information, browser automation is the engine behind the modern digital workforce. This guide provides the most popular and powerful script for this task: a Python script using Selenium to automate website login and data extraction.

We'll walk through a complete, real-world example that you can run on your own machine. This is your definitive starting point for mastering web automation.

The Power of Selenium: Your Browser's Robot Chauffeur

Selenium is an open-source framework that allows you to write code that controls a web browser, just as a human would. You can instruct it to navigate to URLs, find elements on a page, type text into forms, click buttons, and extract any visible data. It is the gold standard for UI testing and a cornerstone of modern Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

How to Use This Script: A Step-by-Step Guide

  1. Prerequisites: You need Python 3, pip (Python's package installer), and the Google Chrome browser installed on your computer.
  2. Save the Script: Click the "Copy Script" button below and save the code into a file named `selenium_automation.py`.
  3. Install Dependencies: This is the most crucial step. Open your terminal or command prompt and run this command to install Selenium and the brilliant `webdriver-manager` library, which automatically handles the browser driver for you: 
    pip install selenium webdriver-manager
  4. Run the Automation: Navigate to your folder in the terminal and simply run the script: 
    python selenium_automation.py
  5. Watch the Magic: A new Chrome window will open automatically. The script will navigate to a demo e-commerce site, type in a username and password, click the login button, and then scrape the titles and prices of products from the inventory page. The results will be printed in your terminal.

The Benefits: Beyond a Simple Script

Mastering this workflow unlocks a vast array of possibilities:


import time
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service as ChromeService
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

def automate_sauce_demo():
    """
    This script automates logging into the Sauce Labs demo e-commerce site
    and scrapes product information from the main inventory page.
    """
    print("--- Starting Selenium Web Automation Script ---")

    # --- 1. Setup WebDriver ---
    # webdriver-manager automatically downloads and manages the correct driver for your Chrome version.
    # This is a modern best practice that eliminates manual driver management.
    print("[SETUP] Initializing Chrome WebDriver...")
    try:
        service = ChromeService(ChromeDriverManager().install())
        
        # Optional: Run in headless mode (no UI window) for server environments
        # options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
        # options.add_argument("--headless")
        # driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=service, options=options)
        
        driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=service)
        
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error initializing WebDriver: {e}")
        return

    # --- 2. Login Process ---
    try:
        print("[ACTION] Navigating to login page...")
        driver.get("https://www.saucedemo.com/")

        print("[ACTION] Entering credentials...")
        # Find the username field by its ID and type in the standard username
        driver.find_element(By.ID, "user-name").send_keys("standard_user")
        
        # Find the password field by its ID and type in the password
        driver.find_element(By.ID, "password").send_keys("secret_sauce")

        print("[ACTION] Clicking login button...")
        driver.find_element(By.ID, "login-button").click()

    except Exception as e:
        print(f"An error occurred during the login process: {e}")
        driver.quit()
        return

    # --- 3. Data Scraping Process ---
    try:
        print("[ACTION] Waiting for inventory page to load...")
        # Use WebDriverWait to ensure the page has loaded before we try to scrape.
        # This is crucial for handling dynamic, modern web applications.
        # We wait up to 10 seconds for an element with the class 'inventory_list' to be visible.
        WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
            EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CLASS_NAME, "inventory_list"))
        )
        print("[SUCCESS] Inventory page loaded.")

        print("\n--- Scraping Product Data ---")
        # Find all elements that represent a product item
        inventory_items = driver.find_elements(By.CLASS_NAME, "inventory_item")
        
        scraped_data = []
        for item in inventory_items:
            # Within each item, find the name and price by their class names
            name = item.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, "inventory_item_name").text
            price = item.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, "inventory_item_price").text
            scraped_data.append({"name": name, "price": price})
            print(f"  - Found: {name} | Price: {price}")
        
        print("\n[SUCCESS] Scraping complete.")
        return scraped_data

    except Exception as e:
        print(f"An error occurred during the scraping process: {e}")
        return None
        
    finally:
        # --- 4. Cleanup ---
        # Always close the browser window to free up system resources.
        print("\n[CLEANUP] Closing browser window...")
        driver.quit()
        print("--- Script Finished ---")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    scraped_products = automate_sauce_demo()
    if scraped_products:
        print(f"\nSuccessfully scraped {len(scraped_products)} products.")
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