I'm trying to automate a very basic task in a website using selenium and chrome but somehow the website detects when chrome is driven by selenium and blocks every request. I suspect that the website is relying on an exposed DOM variable like this one https://stackoverflow.com/a/41904453/648236 to detect selenium driven browser.
My question is, is there a way I can make the navigator.webdriver flag false? I am willing to go so far as to try and recompile the selenium source after making modifications, but I cannot seem to find the NavigatorAutomationInformation source anywhere in the repository https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium
Any help is much appreciated
P.S: I also tried the following from https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/#interface
Object.defineProperty(navigator, 'webdriver', {
get: () => false,
});
But it only updates the property after the initial page load. I think the site detects the variable before my script is executed.
execute_cdp_cmd(): With the availability of execute_cdp_cmd(cmd, cmd_args) command now you can easily execute google-chrome-devtools commands using Selenium. Using this feature you can modify the navigator.webdriver easily to prevent Selenium from getting detected.
To prevent Selenium driven WebDriver getting detected a niche approach would include either / all of the below mentioned steps:
Adding the argument --disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled
from selenium import webdriver
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path=r'C:\WebDrivers\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get("https://www.website.com")
You can find a relevant detailed discussion in Selenium can't open a second page
Rotating the user-agent through execute_cdp_cmd() command as follows:
#Setting up Chrome/83.0.4103.53 as useragent
driver.execute_cdp_cmd('Network.setUserAgentOverride', {"userAgent": 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.53 Safari/537.36'})
Change the property value of the navigator for webdriver to undefined
driver.execute_script("Object.defineProperty(navigator, 'webdriver', {get: () => undefined})")
Exclude the collection of enable-automation switches
options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches", ["enable-automation"])
Turn-off useAutomationExtension
options.add_experimental_option('useAutomationExtension', False)
Clubbing up all the steps mentioned above and effective code block will be:
from selenium import webdriver
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("start-maximized")
options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches", ["enable-automation"])
options.add_experimental_option('useAutomationExtension', False)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path=r'C:\WebDrivers\chromedriver.exe')
driver.execute_script("Object.defineProperty(navigator, 'webdriver', {get: () => undefined})")
driver.execute_cdp_cmd('Network.setUserAgentOverride', {"userAgent": 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.53 Safari/537.36'})
print(driver.execute_script("return navigator.userAgent;"))
driver.get('https://www.httpbin.org/headers')
As per the W3C Editor's Draft the current implementation strictly mentions:
The
webdriver-activeflag is set totruewhen the user agent is under remote control which is initially set tofalse.
Further,
Navigator includes NavigatorAutomationInformation;
It is to be noted that:
The
NavigatorAutomationInformationinterface should not be exposed on WorkerNavigator.
The NavigatorAutomationInformation interface is defined as:
interface mixin NavigatorAutomationInformation {
readonly attribute boolean webdriver;
};
which returns true if webdriver-active flag is set, false otherwise.
Finally, the navigator.webdriver defines a standard way for co-operating user agents to inform the document that it is controlled by WebDriver, so that alternate code paths can be triggered during automation.
Caution: Altering/tweaking the above mentioned parameters may block the navigation and get the WebDriver instance detected.
As of the current implementation an ideal way to access a web page without getting detected would be to use the ChromeOptions() class to add a couple of arguments to:
enable-automation switchesuseAutomationExtensionthrough an instance of ChromeOptions as follows:
Java Example:
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Utility\\BrowserDrivers\\chromedriver.exe");
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.setExperimentalOption("excludeSwitches", Collections.singletonList("enable-automation"));
options.setExperimentalOption("useAutomationExtension", false);
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
driver.get("https://www.google.com/");
Python Example
from selenium import webdriver
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches", ["enable-automation"])
options.add_experimental_option('useAutomationExtension', False)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path=r'C:\path\to\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get("https://www.google.com/")
Ruby Example
options = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.new
options.add_argument("--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled")
driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :chrome, options: options
1: Applies to Selenium's Python clients only.
2: Applies to Selenium's Python clients only.
3: Applies to Selenium's Python clients only.