autopilot: A Python library for automating Chrome

autopilot is a wrapper around Selenium, specifically designed to work with Google Chrome. It implements some human-like behaviors to provide fault tolerance and resilience when exercising production web applications, such as:

• Waiting (impatiently) for elements to load on the screen,
• Refreshing the page when things don't load as expected,
• Typing input at a human pace, and
• Reacting with a human reaction time when elements appear on screen.

Installation

Dependencies

Reference the Dockerfile for an example of how to setup the environment. In general, this project requires:

• WebDriver for Chromium (e.g. apt-get install chromium-chromedriver)
• Python 2.7 with pip (e.g. apt-get install python-pip)
• Selenium (e.g. apt-get install python-selenium or pip install selenium)

Using pip

Distribution via PyPi is not yet available, but you can install the latest version directly from Github:

pip install git+https://github.com/dolph/autopilot

Usage

The primary way to consume autopilot is to write an "autopilot module", and then invoke the module via the autopilot CLI.

Here's a minimal autopilot module:

def start(browser):
    browser.get("https://google.com/")

When run on the CLI, autopilot will launch a browser and pass the browser session to your module's start() function, which will then navigate to Google, and exit:

autopilot minimal_autopilot_module.py

A real-world example

This example navigates the UPS website to obtain tracking information given a particular tracking number.

import os


def start(browser):
    # Variables are passed in via the environment. For example:
    # $ TRACKING_NUMBER="1Z..." autopilot ups_tracking.py
    tracking_number = os.environ['TRACKING_NUMBER']

    # Load the UPS website
    browser.get('https://www.ups.com/')

    # Select the English / US option
    browser.click('//a[@data-code="en_us"]')

    # Type our tracking number into the tracking text input
    browser.type('//textarea[@id="ups-track--qs"]', tracking_number)

    # Click the Tracking submit button
    browser.click('//button[@id="ups-tracking-submit"]')

    # Find the package status and scheduled delivery date
    print(browser.find('//*[@id="stApp_txtPackageStatus"]').text)
    print(browser.find('//*[@id="stApp_scheduledDelivery"]').text)

Note that click(), type(), and find() all accept XPaths as their basic form of input (which are similar to CSS selectors, but more powerful).

The output, after 10-12 seconds:

$ TRACKING_NUMBER="1Z..." autopilot ups_tracking.py
In Transit
03/27/2019