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Selenium: chromedriver executable needs to be in PATH?

by Bernardas Alisauskas May 29, 2023 1 min read

Selenium is a popular web browser automation library used for web scraping. To run, however, Selenium needs special web browser executables called drivers. For example, to run Chrome web browser Selenium needs chromedriver to be installed. Without it a generic exception will be raised:

text
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'chromedriver' executable needs to be in PATH.

This can also mean that the chromedriver is installed but Selenium can't find it. To fix this the chromedriver location should be added to the PATH environment variable:

shell
$ export PATH=$PATH:/location/where/chromedriver/is/

Alternatively, we can specify the driver directly in the Selenium initiation code:

python
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=r'your\path\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get('https://scrapfly.io/')
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