Selenium in Python on Mac - Geckodriver executable needs to be in PATH

SOLVED: I placed the geckodriver exe in /Users/sethkillian/anaconda/bin and now it works from Spyder with no problem. Thanks for the help!

Download the geckodriver and put it in /usr/local/bin; then use webdriver.Firefox like this:

from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path = '/usr/local/bin/geckodriver')

simply download the executable that matches your os from here executables

unzip and put the executable in desired folder in your project use **os ** or any path library to get the path your executable import os from selenium import webdriver path_executable = os.path.abs( path/to/executable ) browser = webdriver.Firefox( executable_path= path_executable )

or you need something flexible which will work no matter the os and no need to download executable but its slower use pip to install webdriver manager webdriver manager doc$ pip install webdriver_manager then from selenium import webdriver from webdriver_manager.firefox import GeckoDriverManager browser=webdriver.Firefox(executable_path=GeckoDriverManager().install())

Perhaps someone can explain why the path isn't found. And I also hope this helps someone else troubleshoot their own path issues.

You can certainly put the geckodriver executible anywhere you'd like. On my Mac, I chose ~/.local/bin since its a common place for executables to be stored that are specific to a user account. For example. the Heroku CLI is placed in ~/.local/share. This approach also eliminates the need for superuser access when adding an executable to a system location like /usr/local/bin

I then added it to the path within my .profile with

    EXPORT PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin

I tested by opening a terminal and checking with:

    geckodriver --version

which worked fine.

But from a Python virtual environment, for some reason, the system path isn't passed?? I discovered this by adding to my selenium test script:

    import sys

    for p in sys.path:
        print(p)

Which showed:

    /Users/philip/Devel/myproject
    /Users/philip/.virtualenvs/myproject/lib/python36.zip
    /Users/philip/.virtualenvs/myproject/lib/python3.6
    /Users/philip/.virtualenvs/myproject/lib/python3.6/lib-dynload
    /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.6/lib/python3.6
    /Users/philip/.virtualenvs/myproject/lib/python3.6/site-packages

So ultimately I had to specify the path with:

    self.browser = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path=r'/Users/philip/.local/bin/geckodriver')

This approach works fine, but I'd still like to know why I couldn't set the path in the virtual environment.