Selenium is a popular automation testing framework used for web application testing. It allows you to interact with web elements and perform various actions on web pages.

In some cases, you may need to configure a proxy server to intercept and modify network requests made by your Selenium script. This can be useful for testing scenarios where you want to simulate different network conditions or bypass certain restrictions.

In this blog post, we will explore how to set up a proxy server in Python using Selenium.

Installing the necessary packages

First, we need to install the necessary packages. We will be using the selenium and webdriver_manager libraries.

pip install selenium
pip install webdriver_manager

Setting up a proxy server with Selenium

To set up a proxy server with Selenium, we need to create a Options instance and specify the proxy settings.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

# Set up proxy options
proxy_options = Options()
proxy_options.add_argument('--proxy-server=http://[proxy_ip]:[proxy_port]')

# Set up Chrome webdriver with proxy options
driver = webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install(), chrome_options=proxy_options)

Replace [proxy_ip] and [proxy_port] with the IP address and port number of your proxy server.

Handling proxy authentication

If your proxy server requires authentication, you can provide the credentials as follows:

# Set up proxy authentication
proxy_options.add_argument('--proxy-auth=user:password')

Replace user and password with the actual username and password required by your proxy server.

Verifying the proxy settings

To verify that the proxy settings are applied correctly, you can navigate to a website and check if the requests are being intercepted by the proxy server.

driver.get('https://www.example.com')

You can monitor the network traffic using tools like Fiddler or Wireshark to see if the requests are going through the proxy.

Conclusion

Setting up a proxy server with Selenium allows you to control and monitor the network requests made by your automation scripts. It can be useful for testing scenarios where you need to simulate different network conditions or bypass certain restrictions.

By following the steps mentioned in this blog post, you should be able to configure a proxy server in Python using Selenium. Happy testing!