The most basic way to get started with Selenium is to use it with the built-in Powershell on your Windows 10 or 11 assuming you’re on a Windows OS.

What is Selenium

Selenium is used to load and test applications on browsers but at the same time, it is a very powerful tool that can be used for data parsing. PowerShell has the base Invoke-Webrequest but it’s just not as powerful as Selenium when it comes to data parsing. In my opinion, it takes more time to get the data you want especially when javascript needs to run to load data.

To install Selenium, run the following command in your PowerShell prompt.

Install-Module -Name selenium -Scope CurrentUser
##or
Install-Module -Name selenium -Scope CurrentUser -MinimumVersion 2.2.0 -AllowClobber -Force
   

Once Selenium has been installed, run this command to import the module

Import-Module -Name Selenium

To confirm that the module has been loaded, run this command

Get-Module

The results should show “Selenium” listed in the name column of the output.

I mainly use Chrome as my browser so, in the next step, I’ll show you how to get the webdriver installed. Open your Chrome browser and enter the following into your browser URL.

chrome://settings/help

You should get something like this. My version is 108.0.5359.98.

Next, you’ll need to go to the following URL to download the Chrome Webdriver.

https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads

Make sure to download the package that corresponds to the version of Chrome you have. In my example, I would download Chrome (Web Driver) version 108 which will work with my browser.

Extract ChromeDriver.exe from the download file.

I use VSCode as my editor so for my case, I will go to the location in my C drive of Windows and then copy the extracted ChromeDriver.exe file and paste it into my Selenium assemblies folder to override the version there.

C:\Users\<your-username>\Documents\PowerShell\Modules\Selenium\x.x.x\assemblies

That’s it! Selenium and Chrome WebDriver is now installed. Stay tuned. In the next article, we’ll get to loading Selenium to do some cool stuff.