Selenium is an open-source framework used for automating web applications. It provides a wide variety of tools to simulate real user behavior when browsing the internet, such as clicking buttons, filling out forms, navigating through pages, etc. One of the most common use cases of the framework is web scraping, a process of automatically collecting data from the web.
Many modern websites use dynamic rendering, meaning that the content is not immediately visible when making a request to the page. Selenium shines in this aspect, as it can pre-render pages before any further actions are performed with the page, ensuring that you get what you see.
For safety reasons, some websites also restrict or limit automated browser activities. Selenium offers the ability to integrate Smartproxy proxies into your script, so that your actions appear as if they were coming from different locations worldwide. This makes them appear genuine and harder to track and block.
To begin, you'll need proxy information from the Smartproxy dashboard. In this example, we're using residential proxies. Follow these steps to get the authentication information and endpoints for your script:
- Open the proxy setup tab.
- Navigate to the Endpoint generator.
- Configure the parameters according to your needs. Set your authentication method, location, session type, and protocol.
- Select the number of proxy endpoints you want to generate (default – 10).
- Copy the endpoints.
To integrate Smartproxy proxies with Selenium, select a programming language of your choice from the list below:
Follow the instructions provided for each language to set up an example project. You'll need to install the Selenium package and the web driver of your choice, which will determine the browser that will be used.
The projects provided are simple templates that you can expand on. They feature a basic script that shows how to set up a proxy connection, make a request to a target website, and retrieve the information present in it.
If you need any help or get stuck, feel free to contact us using one of the methods provided:
Email - sales@smartproxy.com