Running Selenium Webdriver on Bash for Windows

Running Selenium Webdriver on Bash for Windows

This post is recreated from the original at https://blog.henrypoon.com/blog/2017/06/18/running-selenium-webdriver-on-bash-for-windows/

NOTE: This article is for WSL1. For WSL2, see my updated post: Running Selenium Webdriver on WSL2

Bash for Windows had been working great for me until I needed to run Selenium WebDriver on it. I quickly learned that it would not work right out of the box, and the setup for it is quite convoluted.

You will need:

Bash setup

Install Firefox:

1

sudo apt-get install firefox

Export the DISPLAY variable in ~/.bashrc. Just add this to ~/.bashrc:

1

export DISPLAY=:0

Xming setup

Download Xming from the link above and run it.

Download geckodriver

Download geckodriver from the link above and place it in the /usr/bin/ folder in Bash for Windows.

Running Selenium

Here is a piece of sample Python code I used to set up the web browser. It will set up the browser, open Google, sit there for 10 seconds, and then quit. Make sure to have Xming running, otherwise the browser will not start.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27

import time

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver import DesiredCapabilities

def execute_with_retry(method, max_attempts):
    e = None
    for i in range(0, max_attempts):
        try:
            return method()
        except Exception as e:
            print(e)
            time.sleep(1)
    if e is not None:
        raise e

capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.FIREFOX
capabilities["marionette"] = True
firefox_bin = "/usr/bin/firefox"
browser = execute_with_retry(lambda: webdriver.Firefox(
    firefox_binary=firefox_bin, capabilities=capabilities), 10)

browser.get("https://www.google.com")

time.sleep(10)

browser.close()