Login into a website with python and selenium

Question

I'm trying to auto login to a website. When the main page loads, It has a login button, which brings up the login form with username and password forms.

The button is inside a div element with an id equal to 'loginbox':

<div class="col-md-6 col-sm-4 text-right" id="loginbox">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-12 margin-bottom-10">
<button type="button" class="btn btnlogin" data-toggle="modal" data-
target="#loginDiv">

This is my code for finding the button, and then clicking it:

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get('websiteURL') 
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10) 
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@id='loginbox']/button[1]").click()

When I run the code, I get this error:

"Unable to locate element: //div[@id='loginbox']/button[1]"

How should I locate this button?

This is the rest of my code for filling username and password inputs:

username = wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.NAME, "FRMLoginUname")))
username.clear()
username.send_keys('UserName')

password = wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.NAME, "FRMLoginPassword")))
password.clear()
password.send_keys('Password')

Himanshu dua · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-20 11:27:47Z

2

The problem occurs because loginbox is loaded by ajax or jquery. You should use selenium Waits. There is two type of waits explicit and implicit.Avoid using implicit wait.

# Explicit wait example
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
element_login_box = wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, 'loginbox')))


# implicit wait example
driver.implicitly_wait(10) # seconds
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@id='loginbox']/button[1]").click()

answered Jul 20, 2017 at 11:27

Himanshu dua

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6 Comments

Vincent Vidal Over a year ago

On my computer, with the driver for Firefox I need to use a wait() function, whereas with the driver for Chrome I don't. I think that with Chrome, it blocks until the page is fully loaded.

Himanshu dua Over a year ago

@VincentVidal ,Yes but in above question user uses Firefox driver

L1nu5 Over a year ago

@Himanshudua Thanks a lot! I was able to successfully login to the website.

L1nu5 Over a year ago

@VincentVidal, Thank you for mentioning the difference between Chrome and Firefox drivers. It's a great thing to know.

JeffC Over a year ago

I don't think either browser behaves differently in blocking until the page is loaded. In my experience Chrome is just faster and is less likely to need a wait like Firefox or IE.

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