How can I make a Selenium script undetectable using GeckoDriver and Firefox through Python?

Question

Is there a way to make your Selenium script undetectable in Python using geckodriver?

I'm using Selenium for scraping. Are there any protections we need to use so websites can't detect Selenium?

Answer 1

There are different methods to avoid websites detecting the use of Selenium.

1. The value of navigator.webdriver is set to true by default when using Selenium. This variable will be present in Chrome as well as Firefox. This variable should be set to "undefined" to avoid detection.

2. A proxy server can also be used to avoid detection.

3. Some websites are able to use the state of your browser to determine if you are using Selenium. You can set Selenium to use a custom browser profile to avoid this.

The code below uses all three of these approaches.

profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile('C:\\Users\\You\\AppData\\Roaming\\Mozilla\\Firefox\\Profiles\\something.default-release')

PROXY_HOST = "12.12.12.123"
PROXY_PORT = "1234"
profile.set_preference("network.proxy.type", 1)
profile.set_preference("network.proxy.http", PROXY_HOST)
profile.set_preference("network.proxy.http_port", int(PROXY_PORT))
profile.set_preference("dom.webdriver.enabled", False)
profile.set_preference('useAutomationExtension', False)
profile.update_preferences()
desired = DesiredCapabilities.FIREFOX

driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile, desired_capabilities=desired)

Once the code is run, you will be able to manually check that the browser run by Selenium now has your Firefox history and extensions. You can also type "navigator.webdriver" into the devtools console to check that it is undefined.