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Migrating from Selenium and Playwright

If you already automate browsers, most of what you know carries over. This page maps the moves you use every day to their Pydoll equivalents, and points out where Pydoll works differently.

Three things change no matter which tool you come from:

  • No webdriver or bundled browser. Pydoll drives the Chrome or Edge already on your machine over the DevTools Protocol. There is no chromedriver to install or version-match.
  • No explicit waits. find() and query() wait for the element themselves, so the WebDriverWait and expected_conditions dance goes away.
  • Async by default. Every call is awaited inside an async def, started with asyncio.run(). New to that? See Async Python in practice.

From Selenium

Task Selenium Pydoll
Launch driver = webdriver.Chrome() async with Chrome() as browser: tab = await browser.start()
Open a URL driver.get(url) await tab.go_to(url)
Find by id driver.find_element(By.ID, 'q') await tab.find(id='q')
Find by CSS driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, '.item') await tab.query('.item')
Find by XPath driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//a') await tab.query('//a')
Find by text driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//*[text()='Login']") await tab.find(text='Login')
Find many driver.find_elements(By.CSS_SELECTOR, '.item') await tab.query('.item', find_all=True)
Wait for an element WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.presence_of_element_located(...)) await tab.find(id='q', timeout=10)
Click el.click() await el.click()
Type el.send_keys('text') await el.type_text('text')
Press a key el.send_keys(Keys.ENTER) await tab.keyboard.press(Key.ENTER)
Read text el.text await el.text
Read an attribute el.get_attribute('href') el.get_attribute('href')
Screenshot driver.save_screenshot('s.png') await tab.take_screenshot('s.png')
Run JavaScript driver.execute_script('return document.title') await tab.execute_script('return document.title')
Quit driver.quit() leave the async with block, or await browser.stop()

A Selenium login flow and its Pydoll version:

# Selenium
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get('https://quotes.toscrape.com/login')
driver.find_element(By.ID, 'username').send_keys('tester')
driver.find_element(By.ID, 'password').send_keys('secret')
driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "input[type='submit']").click()
WebDriverWait(driver, 5).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.LINK_TEXT, 'Logout')))
driver.quit()

# Pydoll
import asyncio

from pydoll.browser.chromium import Chrome


async def main():
    async with Chrome() as browser:
        tab = await browser.start()
        await tab.go_to('https://quotes.toscrape.com/login')

        await (await tab.find(id='username')).type_text('tester')
        await (await tab.find(id='password')).type_text('secret')
        await (await tab.find(tag_name='input', type='submit')).click()

        await tab.find(text='Logout', timeout=5)

asyncio.run(main())

get_attribute is synchronous

Unlike Selenium, where everything on the element is a network round-trip, Pydoll reads attributes from the element it already located, so get_attribute() is a plain method with no await. Text is still awaited (await el.text).

From Playwright

Task Playwright Pydoll
Launch browser = await p.chromium.launch(); page = await browser.new_page() async with Chrome() as browser: tab = await browser.start()
Open a URL await page.goto(url) await tab.go_to(url)
Find by CSS page.locator('.item') await tab.query('.item')
Find by text page.get_by_text('Login') await tab.find(text='Login')
Find by role/label page.get_by_role('button') await tab.find(tag_name='button')
Find many page.locator('.item').all() await tab.query('.item', find_all=True)
Click await page.locator('.btn').click() await (await tab.find(class_name='btn')).click()
Fill an input await page.fill('#q', 'text') await (await tab.find(id='q')).type_text('text')
Read text await page.locator('.title').text_content() await (await tab.find(class_name='title')).text
Read an attribute await loc.get_attribute('href') el.get_attribute('href')
New tab await context.new_page() await browser.new_tab()
Screenshot await page.screenshot(path='s.png') await tab.take_screenshot('s.png')
Close await browser.close() leave the async with block, or await browser.stop()

Both are async and both auto-wait, so migration is mostly renaming. The main conceptual difference is what a lookup returns:

  • A Playwright locator is lazy: it re-resolves the element every time you act on it.
  • A Pydoll find() / query() returns a WebElement resolved once, then and there. Call find() again if the page replaced the element.
# Playwright
from playwright.async_api import async_playwright

async with async_playwright() as p:
    browser = await p.chromium.launch()
    page = await browser.new_page()
    await page.goto('https://quotes.toscrape.com')
    quote = await page.locator('.quote .text').first.text_content()
    print(quote)
    await browser.close()

# Pydoll
import asyncio

from pydoll.browser.chromium import Chrome


async def main():
    async with Chrome() as browser:
        tab = await browser.start()
        await tab.go_to('https://quotes.toscrape.com')

        quote = await tab.query('.quote .text')
        print(await quote.text)

asyncio.run(main())

Behavior you keep from Playwright, and one you gain

Auto-waiting and async carry over directly. What Pydoll adds is humanize=True on clicks and typing, which moves the cursor along a curved path and types with variable timing. See Human-like interactions.

What's next