ruamel.browser.server 0.4.3

server providing decoupled browser creation/driving via zmq

server providing decoupled browser creation/driving via zmq

The server listens on a port (default 5402) for command strings. These commands should be coming from ruamel.browser.client.

Most command strings start with br BID ... and therefore need to have unique browser id (BID).

You can check if the BID is available (ie. browser opened from previous run) using check BID. If it is not available you should initialise a new browser using init BID TYPE`, where `TYPE is e.g. selenium for a Firefox browser driven by selenium.

If the browser you want to create needs to run under VNC, first create a virtual display using display DISPNAME port_num x-size y-size and then initialise the browser using init display DISPNAME BID TYP (e.g. by doing:

display virt1 5409 1000 500
init display virt1 stackoverflow selenium

You can re-use a DISPNAME for different browsers. If you don’t specify a display the browser will open on the desktop (which needs to be there).

Once you have a BID` for a browser you can sent it commands. All browsers should implement quitting (invoked by br BID quit) and setting the verbosity to something else than 0 (br BID verbose NUM)

You can find an elment on the page in different ways, by CSS selection is the recommended way (that skill can be reused when building websites of your own when specifying CSS files). The syntax is:

find [store ELEM] css|id|class MSG

where MSG is used as a parameter to the css (or id or class) selector. If the optional store ELEM part is used the element on the page is stored for further use in find or other commands that operate on an element or DOM tree part. Find also sets a “current element” which will be used in future commands if no specific element is selected with the optional “elem ID” parameter

Other commands available in the selenium back-end:

title: returns title of current page
current_url: return URL of page that is open
get SOMEURL: "browse" to the page SOMEURL
click [elem ELEM]: click on the current
displayed [elem ELEM]: check if the element is displayed (returns yes or no)
keys [elem ELEM] SEQUENCE_OF_KEYS: send keys to the selected element
down_up [elem ELEM]: similar to click but with a delay after mouse down of 0.5s
javascript PROGRAM: execute PROGRAM in the browser
inner [elem ELEM]: return the inner HTML attribute (for further processing on client side)
hover [elem ELEM]: hover the mouse above an element (might trigger some javascript loading)
findallid [elem ELEM] CSS: for elements by CSS selector (under ELEM if specified) return IDs

As keys can be sent to the browser individually, you can interact with pages expecting people to type in an answer (instead of filling a form element in one go). Using inner you can also get back what is in such an element, .e.g. if the browser did some javascript based expansion.

RBSSELENIUM environment variable

Although automation, especially using VNC displays, doesn’t get you advertisements in your face, you might want to set an environment variable RBSSELENIUM. Under the absolute path that env. var points to, there should be at least two files:

adblock/adblock_plus-2.7-fx+sm+tb+an.xpi
profile00/adblockplus/patterns.ini

Which will be loaded in FireFox preventing advertisements from opening. This can hugely affect the speed with which you can navigate a site.