How can I provide Python's Arsenic with the location of by browser?

Question

I have been trying to use Arsenic to make asynchonous web calls with a webdriver, and I've hit a roadblock. I can get the service (Geckodriver) all set up, however I cannot figure out the proper way to tell Arsenic where the location of the Browser (Firefox) binary is. The documention is sparse and, as near as I can tell, does not touch on this.

Here's how I did Geckodriver:

from arsenic import get_session
from arsenic.browsers import Firefox
from arsenic.services import Geckodriver

service = Geckodriver()
service.binary = "\\path\\to\\binary.exe"

Right after that, I tried just

browser = Firefox()

However when I called async with get_session(service, browser): I got this error:

Expected browser binary location, but unable to find binary in default location, no 'moz:firefoxOptions.binary' capability provided, and no binary flag set on the command line

Because I don't know what the default location is and I'm not using a command line, I tried setting the moz.firefoxOptions.binary capability:

browser = Firefox()
browser.capabilities["moz:firefoxOptions.binary"] = "\\PATH\\TO\\BINARY"

After getting the session with the new browser, I get the error Unrecognised option moz:firefoxOptions.binary so now I really don't know what it wants from me, and I would appreciate any help.

Thank you!

Answer 1

it seems Arsenic is not being updated for a while according to this comment https://github.com/HENNGE/arsenic/pull/142#issuecomment-1552265741

I had some problems with documentation and just opened a issue to this repository and someone answered quickly. You can check this link too https://arsenic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/helloworld.html#writing-the-script It has an example of usage.

import asyncio
import sys

from arsenic import get_session, keys, browsers, services

if sys.platform.startswith('win'):
    GECKODRIVER = './geckodriver.exe'
else:
    GECKODRIVER = './geckodriver'


async def hello_world():
    service = services.Geckodriver(binary=GECKODRIVER)
    browser = browsers.Firefox()
    async with get_session(service, browser) as session:
        await session.get('https://images.google.com/')
        search_box = await session.wait_for_element(5, 'input[name=q]')
        await search_box.send_keys('Cats')
        await search_box.send_keys(keys.ENTER)
        await asyncio.sleep(10)


def main():
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    loop.run_until_complete(hello_world())


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

There is this library that is an option to Arsenic and it is in constant evolution

https://pypi.org/project/caqui/#description

It does not need the WebDriver binary path to work