Sachin Ghait
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    Selenium Webdriver on Raspberry Pi Zero W.

    I have earlier written a post on how selenium can be used to automate browser based tasks.

    Find that post here.

    I recently bought a raspberry-pi, So wanted to add some tasks like making changes in router settings on raspberry-pi device.

    Raspberry Pi zero w overview.

    Raspberry-pi's raspbian OS is Linux based and its hardware is arm based. To check this on your raspberry-pi device run below command.

    $ uname -a

Linux raspber 5.10.17+ #1414 Fri Apr 30 13:16:27 IST 2021 armv6l GNU/Linux

    What challenges I faced ? 😞

    I decided to go for firefox and geckodriver combination along with selenium. I thought this will be lightweight than chromium.

    I did not find any suitable version of geckodriver for arm based machines. As geckodriver project has stopped supporting it since 2018.

    I tried out some older versions of geckodriver shared online. But none of these work for me.

    I also tried one geckodriver version built by someone following below process. And this as well didn't work.

    https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/testing/geckodriver/ARM.html

    I was getting error for OS mismatch with all geckodriver executables I tried.

    Firefox - OSError: [Errno 8] Exec format error

    Solution ✔️

    I thought I have stuck dead-end and was about to keep this thing on the side. Then I found an article about chomium-chromedriver version supported by the Raspbian project.

    https://ivanderevianko.com/2020/01/selenium-chromedriver-for-raspberrypi

    Run below command to install chomium-chromedriver package

    $ sudo apt-get install chromium-chromedriver

    This installs both chromium browser and chromedriver on raspberry-pi. Chromium is required for selenium to run a browser in headless mode and chromedriver to connect and control that browser.

    This package works awesome on raspberry-pi, I was able to get the selenium tasks installed, and run them from CLI commands.

    Later on I used ngrok to access these from anywhere, more about that in below post

    Find that post here.

    References 🖊️