In this tutorial, I will guide you through the process of installing Selenium on a Mac and using it in Python to search for smartwatches on Amazon.

Install Chrome & Chromedriver

To get started with Web Scraping on Mac OS, we need to install Google Chrome and Chromedriver. You can do this by running the following Bash-Script in your terminal.

1) Copy Bash Script

First, copy the following code and create a new file called: mac_update_chromedriver_and_chrome.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Check if Homebrew is installed, install if not
if ! command -v brew &> /dev/null; then
    echo "Homebrew not found. Installing Homebrew..."
    /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
fi

# Update Homebrew
brew update

# Install Google Chrome
if ! command -v google-chrome &> /dev/null; then
    echo "Google Chrome not found. Installing Google Chrome..."
    brew install --cask google-chrome
else
    echo "Google Chrome already installed. Skipping..."
fi

# Install Chromedriver
if ! command -v chromedriver &> /dev/null; then
    echo "Chromedriver not found. Installing Chromedriver..."
    brew install chromedriver
else
    echo "Chromedriver already installed. Skipping..."
fi

echo "Installation complete!"

2) Run Bash Script

Now run your Bash-Script it from your Terminal app on Mac OS.

1. Open the Terminal App and navigate to the directory where the script is located using the "cd" command

cd /Users/nick/Desktop

2. Make the script executable by running the command:

chmod +x update_chromedriver_and_chrome.sh

3. Run the script by typing the command:

./update_chromedriver_and_chrome.sh

When running the script for the first time, you may encounter the following error message:

If you encounter this error, navigate to:

"System Preferences" --> "Security & Privacy"

and click "Allow Anyway"

Now run your bash script again using the command:

./update_chromedriver_and_chrome.sh

3) Check if Installation was Successful

Run the following code in your terminal to check if the installation of Chrome & Chromedriver was successful:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --version && chromedriver --version 

4) Install Selenium in Python Environment

First, activate your Python-Environment. Replace 'nicks-env' with your own python environment you'd like to use:

source venv/nicks-env/bin/activate

And install selenium using

pip install selenium

5) Run a little test script

This script opens Chrome, goes to amazon.com and searches for 'smartwatch'.

Note that the script uses the 'time' library, so you might to 'pip install time' first.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
import time

print("start")
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

url = 'https://www.amazon.com'

driver.get(url)

time.sleep(1)

driver.find_element(by=By.XPATH, value='//*[@id="twotabsearchtextbox"]').send_keys('smartwatch')

time.sleep(1)

driver.find_element(by=By.XPATH, value='//*[@id="nav-search-submit-button"]').click()

time.sleep(5)

driver.close()

print("end")

If you see 'start' and 'end' printed in the console, everything worked as expected.

• For Mac: File Update Chromedriver and Chrome
• For Linux: File Update Chromedriver and Chrome