How to set Selenium Python WebDriver default timeout?

Juan Carlos Coto picture Juan Carlos Coto · Jul 8, 2013 · Viewed 68.8k times · Source

Trying to find a good way to set a maximum time limit for command execution latency in Selenium Python WebDriver. Ideally, something like:

my_driver = get_my_driver()
my_driver.set_timeout(30) # seconds
my_driver.get('http://www.example.com') # stops / throws exception when time is over 30     seconds

would work. I have found .implicitly_wait(30), but I'm not sure if it results in the desired behavior.

In case it is useful, we are specifically using the WebDriver for Firefox.

EDIT

As per @amey's answer, this might be useful:

ff = webdriver.Firefox()
ff.implicitly_wait(10) # seconds
ff.get("http://somedomain/url_that_delays_loading")
myDynamicElement = ff.find_element_by_id("myDynamicElement")

However, it is not clear to me whether the implicit wait applies both to get (which is the desired functionality) and to find_element_by_id.

Thanks very much!

Answer

Juan Carlos Coto picture Juan Carlos Coto · Jul 8, 2013

In python, the method to create a timeout for a page to load is:

Firefox and Chromedriver:

driver.set_page_load_timeout(30)

Other::

driver.implicitly_wait(30)

This will throw a TimeoutException whenever the page load takes more than 30 seconds.