Selenium Wire

Selenium Wire extends Selenium's Python bindings to give you access to the underlying requests made by the browser. You author your code in the same way as you do with Selenium, but you get extra APIs for inspecting requests and responses and making changes to them on the fly.

Simple Example

from seleniumwire import webdriver  # Import from seleniumwire

# Create a new instance of the Chrome driver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

# Go to the Google home page
driver.get('https://www.google.com')

# Access requests via the `requests` attribute
for request in driver.requests:
    if request.response:
        print(
            request.url,
            request.response.status_code,
            request.response.headers['Content-Type']
        )

Prints:

https://www.google.com/ 200 text/html; charset=UTF-8
https://www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_120x44dp.png 200 image/png
https://consent.google.com/status?continue=https://www.google.com&pc=s&timestamp=1531511954&gl=GB 204 text/html; charset=utf-8
https://www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_272x92dp.png 200 image/png
https://ssl.gstatic.com/gb/images/i2_2ec824b0.png 200 image/png
https://www.google.com/gen_204?s=webaft&t=aft&atyp=csi&ei=kgRJW7DBONKTlwTK77wQ&rt=wsrt.366,aft.58,prt.58 204 text/html; charset=UTF-8
...

Features

• Pure Python, user-friendly API
• HTTP and HTTPS requests captured
• Intercept requests and responses
• Modify headers, parameters, body content on the fly
• Capture websocket messages
• HAR format supported
• Proxy server support

Compatibilty

• Python 3.7+
• Selenium 4.0.0+
• Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Remote Webdriver supported

Table of Contents

• Installation
  • Browser Setup
  • OpenSSL
• Creating the Webdriver
• Accessing Requests
• Request Objects
• Response Objects
• Intercepting Requests and Responses
  • Example: Add a request header
  • Example: Replace an existing request header
  • Example: Add a response header
  • Example: Add a request parameter
  • Example: Update JSON in a POST request body
  • Example: Basic authentication
  • Example: Block a request
  • Example: Mock a response
  • Unset an interceptor
• Limiting Request Capture
• Request Storage
  • In-Memory Storage
• Proxies
  • SOCKS
  • Switching Dynamically
• Bot Detection
• Certificates
  • Using Your Own Certificate
• All Options
• License

Installation

Install using pip:

pip install selenium-wire

If you get an error about not being able to build cryptography you may be running an old version of pip. Try upgrading pip with python -m pip install --upgrade pip and then re-run the above command.

Browser Setup

No specific configuration should be necessary except to ensure that you have downloaded the relevent webdriver executable for your browser and placed it somewhere on your system PATH.

• Download webdriver for Chrome
• Download webdriver for Firefox
• Download webdriver for Edge

OpenSSL

Selenium Wire requires OpenSSL for decrypting HTTPS requests. This is probably already installed on your system (you can check by running openssl version on the command line). If it's not installed you can install it with:

Linux

# For apt based Linux systems
sudo apt install openssl

# For RPM based Linux systems
sudo yum install openssl

# For Linux alpine
sudo apk add openssl

MacOS

brew install openssl

Windows

No installation is required.

Creating the Webdriver

Ensure that you import webdriver from the seleniumwire package:

from seleniumwire import webdriver

Then just instantiate the webdriver as you would if you were using Selenium directly. You can pass in any desired capabilities or browser specific options - such as the executable path, headless mode etc. Selenium Wire also has it's own options that can be passed in the seleniumwire_options attribute.

# Create the driver with no options (use defaults)
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

# Or create using browser specific options and/or seleniumwire_options options
driver = webdriver.Chrome(
    options = webdriver.ChromeOptions(...),
    seleniumwire_options={...}
)

Note that for sub-packages of webdriver, you should continue to import these directly from selenium. For example, to import WebDriverWait:

# Sub-packages of webdriver must still be imported from `selenium` itself
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait

Remote Webdriver

Selenium Wire has limited support for using the remote webdriver client. When you create an instance of the remote webdriver, you need to specify the hostname or IP address of the machine (or container) running Selenium Wire. This allows the remote instance to communicate back to Selenium Wire with its requests and responses.

options = {
    'addr': 'hostname_or_ip'  # Address of the machine running Selenium Wire. Explicitly use 127.0.0.1 rather than localhost if remote session is running locally.
}
driver = webdriver.Remote(
    command_executor='http://www.example.com',
    seleniumwire_options=options
)

If the machine running the browser needs to use a different address to talk to the machine running Selenium Wire you need to configure the browser manually. This issue goes into more detail.

Accessing Requests

Selenium Wire captures all HTTP/HTTPS traffic made by the browser [1]. The following attributes provide access to requests and responses.

driver.requests

The list of captured requests in chronological order.

driver.last_request

Convenience attribute for retrieving the most recently captured request. This is more efficient than using driver.requests[-1].

driver.wait_for_request(pat, timeout=10)

This method will wait until it sees a request matching a pattern. The pat attribute will be matched within the request URL. pat can be a simple substring or a regular expression. Note that driver.wait_for_request() doesn't make a request, it just waits for a previous request made by some other action and it will return the first request it finds. Also note that since pat can be a regular expression, you must escape special characters such as question marks with a slash. A TimeoutException is raised if no match is found within the timeout period.

For example, to wait for an AJAX request to return after a button is clicked:

# Click a button that triggers a background request to https://server/api/products/12345/
button_element.click()

# Wait for the request/response to complete
request = driver.wait_for_request('/api/products/12345/')

driver.har

A JSON formatted HAR archive of HTTP transactions that have taken place. HAR capture is turned off by default and you must set the enable_har option to True before using driver.har.

driver.iter_requests()

Returns an iterator over captured requests. Useful when dealing with a large number of requests.

driver.request_interceptor

Used to set a request interceptor. See Intercepting Requests and Responses.

driver.response_interceptor

Used to set a response interceptor.

Clearing Requests

To clear previously captured requests and HAR entries, use del:

del driver.requests

Request Objects

Request objects have the following attributes.

body

The request body as bytes. If the request has no body the value of body will be empty, i.e. b''.

cert

Information about the server SSL certificate in dictionary format. Empty for non-HTTPS requests.

date

The datetime the request was made.

headers

A dictionary-like object of request headers. Headers are case-insensitive and duplicates are permitted. Asking for request.headers['user-agent'] will return the value of the User-Agent header. If you wish to replace a header, make sure you delete the existing header first with del request.headers['header-name'], otherwise you'll create a duplicate.

host

The request host, e.g. www.example.com

method

The HTTP method, e.g. GET or POST etc.

params

A dictionary of request parameters. If a parameter with the same name appears more than once in the request, it's value in the dictionary will be a list.

path

The request path, e.g. /some/path/index.html

querystring

The query string, e.g. foo=bar&spam=eggs

response

The response object associated with the request. This will be None if the request has no response.

url

The request URL, e.g. https://www.example.com/some/path/index.html?foo=bar&spam=eggs

ws_messages

Where the request is a websocket handshake request (normally with a URL starting wss://) then ws_messages will contain a list of any websocket messages sent and received. See WebSocketMessage Objects.

Request objects have the following methods.

abort(error_code=403)

Trigger immediate termination of the request with the supplied error code. For use within request interceptors. See Example: Block a request.

create_response(status_code, headers=(), body=b'')

Create a response and return it without sending any data to the remote server. For use within request interceptors. See Example: Mock a response.

WebSocketMessage Objects

These objects represent websocket messages sent between the browser and server and vice versa. They are held in a list by request.ws_messages on websocket handshake requests. They have the following attributes.

content

The message content which may be either str or bytes.

date

The datetime of the message.

from_client

True when the message was sent by the client and False when sent by the server.

Response Objects

Response objects have the following attributes.

body

The response body as bytes. If the response has no body the value of body will be empty, i.e. b''. Sometimes the body may have been compressed by the server. You can prevent this with the disable_encoding option. To manually decode an encoded response body you can do:

from seleniumwire.utils import decode

body = decode(response.body, response.headers.get('Content-Encoding', 'identity'))

date

The datetime the response was received.

headers

A dictionary-like object of response headers. Headers are case-insensitive and duplicates are permitted. Asking for response.headers['content-length'] will return the value of the Content-Length header. If you wish to replace a header, make sure you delete the existing header first with del response.headers['header-name'], otherwise you'll create a duplicate.

reason

The reason phrase, e.g. OK or Not Found etc.

status_code

The status code of the response, e.g. 200 or 404 etc.

Intercepting Requests and Responses

As well as capturing requests and responses, Selenium Wire allows you to modify them on the fly using interceptors. An interceptor is a function that gets invoked with requests and responses as they pass through Selenium Wire. Within an interceptor you can modify the request and response as you see fit.

You set your interceptor functions using the driver.request_interceptor and driver.response_interceptor attributes before you start using the driver. A request interceptor should accept a single argument for the request. A response interceptor should accept two arguments, one for the originating request and one for the response.

Example: Add a request header

def interceptor(request):
    request.headers['New-Header'] = 'Some Value'

driver.request_interceptor = interceptor
driver.get(...)

# All requests will now contain New-Header

How can I check that a header has been set correctly? You can print the headers from captured requests after the page has loaded using driver.requests, or alternatively point the webdriver at https://httpbin.org/headers which will echo the request headers back to the browser so you can view them.

Example: Replace an existing request header

Duplicate header names are permitted in an HTTP request, so before setting the replacement header you must first delete the existing header using del like in the following example, otherwise two headers with the same name will exist (request.headers is a special dictionary-like object that allows duplicates).

def interceptor(request):
    del request.headers['Referer']  # Remember to delete the header first
    request.headers['Referer'] = 'some_referer'  # Spoof the referer

driver.request_interceptor = interceptor
driver.get(...)

# All requests will now use 'some_referer' for the referer

Example: Add a response header

def interceptor(request, response):  # A response interceptor takes two args
    if request.url == 'https://server.com/some/path':
        response.headers['New-Header'] = 'Some Value'

driver.response_interceptor = interceptor
driver.get(...)

# Responses from https://server.com/some/path will now contain New-Header

Example: Add a request parameter

Request parameters work differently to headers in that they are calculated when they are set on the request. That means that you first have to read them, then update them, and then write them back - like in the following example. Parameters are held in a regular dictionary, so parameters with the same name will be overwritten.

def interceptor(request):
    params = request.params
    params['foo'] = 'bar'
    request.params = params

driver.request_interceptor = interceptor
driver.get(...)

# foo=bar will be added to all requests

Example: Update JSON in a POST request body

import json

def interceptor(request):
    if request.method == 'POST' and request.headers['Content-Type'] == 'application/json':
        # The body is in bytes so convert to a string
        body = request.body.decode('utf-8')
        # Load the JSON
        data = json.loads(body)
        # Add a new property
        data['foo'] = 'bar'
        # Set the JSON back on the request
        request.body = json.dumps(data).encode('utf-8')
        # Update the content length
        del request.headers['Content-Length']
        request.headers['Content-Length'] = str(len(request.body))

driver.request_interceptor = interceptor
driver.get(...)

Example: Basic authentication

If a site requires a username/password, you can use a request interceptor to add authentication credentials to each request. This will stop the browser from displaying a username/password pop-up.

import base64

auth = (
    base64.encodebytes('my_username:my_password'.encode())
    .decode()
    .strip()
)

def interceptor(request):
    if request.host == 'host_that_needs_auth':
        request.headers['Authorization'] = f'Basic {auth}'

driver.request_interceptor = interceptor
driver.get(...)

# Credentials will be transmitted with every request to "host_that_needs_auth"

Example: Block a request

You can use request.abort() to block a request and send an immediate response back to the browser. An optional error code can be supplied. The default is 403 (forbidden).

def interceptor(request):
    # Block PNG, JPEG and GIF images
    if request.path.endswith(('.png', '.jpg', '.gif')):
        request.abort()

driver.request_interceptor = interceptor
driver.get(...)

# Requests for PNG, JPEG and GIF images will result in a 403 Forbidden

Example: Mock a response

You can use request.create_response() to send a custom reply back to the browser. No data will be sent to the remote server.

def interceptor(request):
    if request.url == 'https://server.com/some/path':
        request.create_response(
            status_code=200,
            headers={'Content-Type': 'text/html'},  # Optional headers dictionary
            body='<html>Hello World!</html>'  # Optional body
        )

driver.request_interceptor = interceptor
driver.get(...)

# Requests to https://server.com/some/path will have their responses mocked

Have any other examples you think could be useful? Feel free to submit a PR.

Unset an interceptor

To unset an interceptor, use del:

del driver.request_interceptor
del driver.response_interceptor

Limiting Request Capture

Selenium Wire works by redirecting browser traffic through an internal proxy server it spins up in the background. As requests flow through the proxy they are intercepted and captured. Capturing requests can slow things down a little but there are a few things you can do to restrict what gets captured.

driver.scopes

This accepts a list of regular expressions that will match the URLs to be captured. It should be set on the driver before making any requests. When empty (the default) all URLs are captured.

driver.scopes = [
    '.*stackoverflow.*',
    '.*github.*'
]

driver.get(...)  # Start making requests

# Only request URLs containing "stackoverflow" or "github" will now be captured

Note that even if a request is out of scope and not captured, it will still travel through Selenium Wire.

seleniumwire_options.disable_capture

Use this option to switch off request capture. Requests will still pass through Selenium Wire and through any upstream proxy you have configured but they won't be intercepted or stored. Request interceptors will not execute.

options = {
    'disable_capture': True  # Don't intercept/store any requests
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

seleniumwire_options.exclude_hosts

Use this option to bypass Selenium Wire entirely. Any requests made to addresses listed here will go direct from the browser to the server without involving Selenium Wire. Note that if you've configured an upstream proxy then these requests will also bypass that proxy.

options = {
    'exclude_hosts': ['host1.com', 'host2.com']  # Bypass Selenium Wire for these hosts
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

request.abort()

You can abort a request early by using request.abort() from within a request interceptor. This will send an immediate response back to the client without the request travelling any further. You can use this mechanism to block certain types of requests (e.g. images) to improve page load performance.

def interceptor(request):
    # Block PNG, JPEG and GIF images
    if request.path.endswith(('.png', '.jpg', '.gif')):
        request.abort()

driver.request_interceptor = interceptor

driver.get(...)  # Start making requests

Request Storage

Captured requests and responses are stored in the system temp folder by default (that's /tmp on Linux and usually C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp on Windows) in a sub-folder called .seleniumwire. To change where the .seleniumwire folder gets created you can use the request_storage_base_dir option:

options = {
    'request_storage_base_dir': '/my/storage/folder'  # .seleniumwire will get created here
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

In-Memory Storage

Selenium Wire also supports storing requests and responses in memory only, which may be useful in certain situations - e.g. if you're running short lived Docker containers and don't want the overhead of disk persistence. You can enable in-memory storage by setting the request_storage option to memory:

options = {
    'request_storage': 'memory'  # Store requests and responses in memory only
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

If you're concerned about the amount of memory that may be consumed, you can restrict the number of requests that are stored with the request_storage_max_size option:

options = {
    'request_storage': 'memory',
    'request_storage_max_size': 100  # Store no more than 100 requests in memory
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

When the max size is reached, older requests are discarded as newer requests arrive. Keep in mind that if you restrict the number of requests being stored, requests may have disappeared from storage by the time you come to retrieve them with driver.requests or driver.wait_for_request() etc.

Proxies

If the site you are accessing sits behind a proxy server you can tell Selenium Wire about that proxy server in the options you pass to the webdriver.

The configuration takes the following format:

options = {
    'proxy': {
        'http': 'http://192.168.10.100:8888',
        'https': 'https://192.168.10.100:8888',
        'no_proxy': 'localhost,127.0.0.1'
    }
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

To use HTTP Basic Auth with your proxy, specify the username and password in the URL:

options = {
    'proxy': {
        'https': 'https://user:[email protected]:8888',
    }
}

For authentication other than Basic, you can supply the full value for the Proxy-Authorization header using the custom_authorization option. For example, if your proxy used the Bearer scheme:

options = {
    'proxy': {
        'https': 'https://192.168.10.100:8888',  # No username or password used
        'custom_authorization': 'Bearer mytoken123'  # Custom Proxy-Authorization header value
    }
}

More info on the Proxy-Authorization header can be found here.

The proxy configuration can also be loaded through environment variables called HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY:

$ export HTTP_PROXY="http://192.168.10.100:8888"
$ export HTTPS_PROXY="https://192.168.10.100:8888"
$ export NO_PROXY="localhost,127.0.0.1"

SOCKS

Using a SOCKS proxy is the same as using an HTTP based one but you set the scheme to socks5:

options = {
    'proxy': {
        'http': 'socks5://user:[email protected]:8888',
        'https': 'socks5://user:[email protected]:8888',
        'no_proxy': 'localhost,127.0.0.1'
    }
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

You can leave out the user and pass if your proxy doesn't require authentication.

As well as socks5, the schemes socks4 and socks5h are supported. Use socks5h when you want DNS resolution to happen on the proxy server rather than on the client.

Using Selenium Wire with Tor

See this example if you want to run Selenium Wire with Tor.

Switching Dynamically

If you want to change the proxy settings for an existing driver instance, use the driver.proxy attribute:

driver.get(...)  # Using some initial proxy

# Change the proxy
driver.proxy = {
    'https': 'https://user:[email protected]:8888',
}

driver.get(...)  # These requests will use the new proxy

To clear a proxy, set driver.proxy to an empty dict {}.

This mechanism also supports the no_proxy and custom_authorization options.

Bot Detection

Selenium Wire will integrate with undetected-chromedriver if it finds it in your environment. This library will transparently modify ChromeDriver to prevent it from triggering anti-bot measures on websites.

If you wish to take advantage of this make sure you have undetected_chromedriver installed:

pip install undetected-chromedriver

Then in your code, import the seleniumwire.undetected_chromedriver package:

import seleniumwire.undetected_chromedriver as uc

chrome_options = uc.ChromeOptions()

driver = uc.Chrome(
    options=chrome_options,
    seleniumwire_options={}
)

Certificates

Selenium Wire uses it's own root certificate to decrypt HTTPS traffic. It is not normally necessary for the browser to trust this certificate because Selenium Wire tells the browser to add it as an exception. This will allow the browser to function normally, but it will display a "Not Secure" message (and/or unlocked padlock) in the address bar. If you wish to get rid of this message you can install the root certificate manually.

You can download the root certificate here. Once downloaded, navigate to "Certificates" in your browser settings and import the certificate in the "Authorities" section.

Using Your Own Certificate

If you would like to use your own root certificate you can supply the path to the certificate and the private key using the ca_cert and ca_key options.

If you do specify your own certificate, be sure to manually delete Selenium Wire's temporary storage folder. This will clear out any existing certificates that may have been cached from previous runs.

All Options

A summary of all options that can be passed to Selenium Wire via the seleniumwire_options webdriver attribute.

addr

The IP address or hostname of the machine running Selenium Wire. This defaults to 127.0.0.1. You may want to change this to the public IP of the machine (or container) if you're using the remote webdriver.

options = {
    'addr': '192.168.0.10'  # Use the public IP of the machine
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

auto_config

Whether Selenium Wire should auto-configure the browser for request capture. True by default.

ca_cert

The path to a root (CA) certificate if you prefer to use your own certificate rather than use the default.

options = {
    'ca_cert': '/path/to/ca.crt'  # Use own root certificate
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

ca_key

The path to the private key if you're using your own root certificate. The key must always be supplied when using your own certificate.

options = {
    'ca_key': '/path/to/ca.key'  # Path to private key
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

disable_capture

Disable request capture. When True nothing gets intercepted or stored. False by default.

options = {
    'disable_capture': True  # Don't intercept/store any requests.
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

disable_encoding

Ask the server to send back uncompressed data. False by default. When True this sets the Accept-Encoding header to identity for all outbound requests. Note that it won't always work - sometimes the server may ignore it.

options = {
    'disable_encoding': True  # Ask the server not to compress the response
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

enable_har

When True a HAR archive of HTTP transactions will be kept which can be retrieved with driver.har. False by default.

options = {
    'enable_har': True  # Capture HAR data, retrieve with driver.har
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

exclude_hosts

A list of addresses for which Selenium Wire should be bypassed entirely. Note that if you have configured an upstream proxy then requests to excluded hosts will also bypass that proxy.

options = {
    'exclude_hosts': ['google-analytics.com']  # Bypass these hosts
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

ignore_http_methods

A list of HTTP methods (specified as uppercase strings) that should be ignored by Selenium Wire and not captured. The default is ['OPTIONS'] which ignores all OPTIONS requests. To capture all request methods, set ignore_http_methods to an empty list:

options = {
    'ignore_http_methods': []  # Capture all requests, including OPTIONS requests
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

port

The port number that Selenium Wire's backend listens on. You don't normally need to specify a port as a random port number is chosen automatically.

options = {
    'port': 9999  # Tell the backend to listen on port 9999 (not normally necessary to set this)
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

proxy

The upstream proxy server configuration if you're using a proxy.

options = {
    'proxy': {
        'http': 'http://user:[email protected]:8888',
        'https': 'https://user:[email protected]:8889',
        'no_proxy': 'localhost,127.0.0.1'
    }
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

request_storage

The type of storage to use. Selenium Wire defaults to disk based storage, but you can switch to in-memory storage by setting this option to memory:

options = {
    'request_storage': 'memory'  # Store requests and responses in memory only
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

request_storage_base_dir

The base location where Selenium Wire stores captured requests and responses when using its default disk based storage. This defaults to the system temp folder (that's /tmp on Linux and usually C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp on Windows). A sub-folder called .seleniumwire will get created here to store the captured data.

options = {
    'request_storage_base_dir': '/my/storage/folder'  # .seleniumwire will get created here
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

request_storage_max_size

The maximum number of requests to store when using in-memory storage. Unlimited by default. This option currently has no effect when using the default disk based storage.

options = {
    'request_storage': 'memory',
    'request_storage_max_size': 100  # Store no more than 100 requests in memory
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

suppress_connection_errors

Whether to suppress connection related tracebacks. True by default, meaning that harmless errors that sometimes occur at browser shutdown do not alarm users. When suppressed, the connection error message is logged at DEBUG level without a traceback. Set to False to allow exception propagation and see full tracebacks.

options = {
    'suppress_connection_errors': False  # Show full tracebacks for any connection errors
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

verify_ssl

Whether SSL certificates should be verified. False by default, which prevents errors with self-signed certificates.

options = {
    'verify_ssl': True  # Verify SSL certificates but beware of errors with self-signed certificates
}
driver = webdriver.Chrome(seleniumwire_options=options)

License

MIT