WebDriver.py

Python library to drive a headless Chrome browser with CAS-authenticated websites

Details

This is a simple wrapper to the excellent Python Selenium module for controlling a Selenium WebDriver in Python. This allows one to write functional/acceptance tests for web applications, and also to automate a process where the only available interface is an HTML web page.

This particular wrapper exists to abstract the common tasks needed to handle authentication through the TAMU Central Authentication Service (CAS), including the extra step of waiting for Duo 2-factor authentication when necessary (this is the default expectation, but it can be supressed).

Examples

Here's a simple example to interact with a webapp that requires TAMU NetID authentication and also Duo 2FA:

import WebDriver
import getpass

# Create a WebDriver object to handle authenticated sites 
web = WebDriver.AuthenticatedWeb("https://gateway.tamu.edu/settings/email/")

# Get a NetID and password from the user
username = input('NetID: ')
password = getpass.getpass('Password: ')

# Invoke the authentication method (by default it expects 2FA)
print("Waiting for Duo 2FA...")
web.authenticate(username, password)

# Print all email aliases for the authenticated user
for item in web.by_xpath('//*[@id="contentarea"]/div[2]/section[2]/div[2]/div/ul/li', find_all=True):
  print(item.text)

A more complex example that demonstrates all available optional parameters for the class constructor and the authenticate() method:

import WebDriver
import logging

# Override the default settings (values shown here are default)
CHROME = "/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome"
DRIVER = "bin/chromedriver"
AUTHURL = "https://cas.tamu.edu"
TIMEOUT = 15
LOG_LVL = logging.DEBUG

# The object constructor has one required parameter (URL). All others are optional
web = WebDriver.AuthenticatedWeb(URL, chrome_path=CHROME, chrome_driver=DRIVER, auth_url=AUTHURL, duo_timeout=TIMEOUT, log_level=LOG_LVL)

# The authenticate() method expects a username and password. The third parameter is optional, and True by default.
web.authenticate(USERNAME, PASSWORD, expect_duo=True)

Installation

This is only a simple library, and not a complete Python module. Merely placing the single file in your Python include path should be sufficient to import WebDriver.

Use of this code assumes:

• Python 3 (>=3.6)
• Selenium ($ pip install selenium)
• ChromeDriver binary (available at http://chromedriver.chromium.org) >=2.4
• Chrome binary (>= v61)

This code has been tested on macOS 10.14. It should also run on Linux, but I haven't tested it (caveat emptor).

Methods Reference

constructor

authenticate()

by_xpath(xpath_str, find_all=False)

by_name(elem_name, find_all=False)

by_id(elem_id)

go(url)