Introduction to Selenium

Selenium is the industry-standard tool for automating web browsers, trusted by millions of testers worldwide.

Selenium WebDriver is the most widely used browser automation tool, supporting multiple programming languages and browsers.

What is Selenium?

Selenium is an open-source suite of tools for automating web browsers. It provides a portable framework for testing web applications across different browsers and platforms.

Selenium Components

Selenium WebDriver: The core component for browser automation
Selenium Grid: Enables parallel test execution across multiple machines
Selenium IDE: Record and playback tool for creating tests

Supported Languages

Selenium supports multiple programming languages:

Java
Python
C#
JavaScript (Node.js)
Ruby

Basic Example (Python)

Here's a simple Selenium WebDriver test in Python:

python

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

# Initialize the Chrome driver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

try:
    # Navigate to Google
    driver.get("https://www.google.com")
    
    # Find the search box
    search_box = driver.find_element(By.NAME, "q")
    
    # Type a search query
    search_box.send_keys("Selenium WebDriver")
    search_box.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
    
    # Wait and verify results
    assert "Selenium WebDriver" in driver.title
    
finally:
    # Close the browser
    driver.quit()

Basic Example (JavaScript)

javascript

const { Builder, By, Key, until } = require('selenium-webdriver');

(async function example() {
  // Create a new Chrome driver instance
  let driver = await new Builder().forBrowser('chrome').build();
  
  try {
    // Navigate to Google
    await driver.get('https://www.google.com');
    
    // Find the search box and enter text
    await driver.findElement(By.name('q')).sendKeys('Selenium WebDriver', Key.RETURN);
    
    // Wait for and verify the title
    await driver.wait(until.titleContains('Selenium'), 5000);
    
  } finally {
    // Quit the driver
    await driver.quit();
  }
})();

Next: Setup WebDriver →