39

I am using Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS. Executing python -V returns Python 2.7.12. I am building a virtualenv off of that so as to install the Selenium package into it via:

pip install -upgrade selenium

But when doing a trial run with the following python script:

from selenium import webdriver
browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('http://seleniumhq.org/')

it results this error:

 Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/home/myuser/bin/selenium-experiment.py", line 2, in <module>
     browser = webdriver.Firefox()
   File "/home/myuser/python_virtualenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/webdriver.py", line 135, in __init__
     self.service.start()
   File "/home/myuser/python_virtualenv/local/lib/python2.7/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. 

 Exception AttributeError: "'Service' object has no attribute 'process'" in <bound method Service.__del__ of <selenium.webdriver.firefox.service.Service object at 0x7f782c1caa50>> ignored

Since geckodriver is an executable, I concluded that it should be provided by the installation of the selenium package via pip or at least error out with some message stating what I need to do next. Apparently not, so I dug further: I thought that perhaps Ubuntu should have a package that provides the geckodriver executable so I used apt-file search geckodriver to search for it and found no results.

Where do I get this geckodriver executable?

3
  • Get it from github.com/mozilla/geckodriver.
    – edwinksl
    Nov 20, 2016 at 3:35
  • 1
    Why can't pip install command for selenium just install whatever selenium depends upon?
    – bgoodr
    Nov 20, 2016 at 3:43
  • 3
    That's a question for maintainers of Selenium and geckodriver. All I can say is you do have to get geckodriver from somewhere (GitHub in this case) other than PyPI.
    – edwinksl
    Nov 20, 2016 at 3:44

2 Answers 2

51

Find the latest release for your OS.

Extract it, and copy geckodriver to /usr/local/bin -- so if v0.11.1 was the most recent version, and you were on 64bit linux, you'd do this:

export GECKO_DRIVER_VERSION='v0.24.0'
wget https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases/download/$GECKO_DRIVER_VERSION/geckodriver-$GECKO_DRIVER_VERSION-linux64.tar.gz
tar -xvzf geckodriver-$GECKO_DRIVER_VERSION-linux64.tar.gz
rm geckodriver-$GECKO_DRIVER_VERSION-linux64.tar.gz
chmod +x geckodriver
cp geckodriver /usr/local/bin/

Now your trial run should work.

4
  • 2
    Same method applies for chromedriver as well. :) Dec 27, 2016 at 12:07
  • 1
    chromedriver can now be installed with apt-get install -qqy chromedriver.
    – Kurt
    Jun 4, 2018 at 21:20
  • If this doesn't work, copy the gecko driver to /usr/bin. This worked for me Jun 13, 2019 at 8:29
  • cp geckodriver /usr/local/bin/ needs SUDO permission. So Sudo it. Oct 24, 2019 at 8:55
16

Ubuntu 16.04+:

sudo apt-get install firefox-geckodriver
1

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .