Selenium using Python - Geckodriver executable needs to be in PATH

Question

I'm new to programming and started with Python about 2 months ago and am going over Sweigart's Automate the Boring Stuff with Python text. I'm using IDLE and already installed the selenium module and the Firefox browser. Whenever I tried to run the webdriver function, I get this:

from selenium import webdriver
browser = webdriver.Firefox()

Exception :-

Exception ignored in: <bound method Service.__del__ of <selenium.webdriver.firefox.service.Service object at 0x00000249C0DA1080>>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python\Python35\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\common\service.py", line 163, in __del__
    self.stop()
  File "C:\Python\Python35\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\common\service.py", line 135, in stop
    if self.process is None:
AttributeError: 'Service' object has no attribute 'process'
Exception ignored in: <bound method Service.__del__ of <selenium.webdriver.firefox.service.Service object at 0x00000249C0E08128>>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python\Python35\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\common\service.py", line 163, in __del__
    self.stop()
  File "C:\Python\Python35\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\common\service.py", line 135, in stop
    if self.process is None:
AttributeError: 'Service' object has no attribute 'process'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python\Python35\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\common\service.py", line 64, in start
    stdout=self.log_file, stderr=self.log_file)
  File "C:\Python\Python35\lib\subprocess.py", line 947, in __init__
    restore_signals, start_new_session)
  File "C:\Python\Python35\lib\subprocess.py", line 1224, in _execute_child
    startupinfo)
FileNotFoundError: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#11>", line 1, in <module>
    browser = webdriver.Firefox()
  File "C:\Python\Python35\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\firefox\webdriver.py", line 135, in __init__
    self.service.start()
  File "C:\Python\Python35\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\common\service.py", line 71, in start
    os.path.basename(self.path), self.start_error_message)
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'geckodriver' executable needs to be in PATH. 

I think I need to set the path for geckodriver but not sure how, so can anyone tell me how would I do this?

Answer 1

selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'geckodriver' executable needs to be in PATH.

First of all you will need to download latest executable geckodriver from here to run latest Firefox using Selenium

Actually, the Selenium client bindings tries to locate the geckodriver executable from the system PATH. You will need to add the directory containing the executable to the system path.

• On Unix systems you can do the following to append it to your system’s search path, if you’re using a Bash-compatible shell:

    export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/directory/of/executable/downloaded/in/previous/step
  

• On Windows you will need to update the Path system variable to add the full directory path to the executable geckodriver manually or command line** (don't forget to restart your system after adding executable geckodriver into system PATH to take effect)**. The principle is the same as on Unix.

Now you can run your code same as you're doing as below :-

from selenium import webdriver

browser = webdriver.Firefox()

selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: Expected browser binary location, but unable to find binary in default location, no 'moz:firefoxOptions.binary' capability provided, and no binary flag set on the command line

The exception clearly states you have installed Firefox some other location while Selenium is trying to find Firefox and launch from the default location, but it couldn't find it. You need to provide explicitly Firefox installed binary location to launch Firefox as below :-

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.firefox_binary import FirefoxBinary

binary = FirefoxBinary('path/to/installed firefox binary')
browser = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_binary=binary)

https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases

For windonws: download the file from Github then extracted it and paste it on python file it will work with me.

https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases

for me my path path is: C:\Users\MYUSERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39