steel-selenium-starter

Steel + Selenium Starter

This template shows you how to use Steel with Selenium to run browser automations in the cloud. It includes session management, error handling, and a basic example you can customize.

Installation

Clone this repository, navigate to the examples/steel-selenium-starter, and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/steel-dev/steel-cookbook
cd steel-cookbook/examples/steel-selenium-starter

# Create and activate virtual environment (recommended)
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows use: venv\Scripts\activate

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

Quick start

The example script in main.py shows you how to:

• Create and manage a Steel browser session
• Connect Selenium to the session
• Navigate to a website (Hacker News in this example)
• Extract data from the page (top 5 stories)
• Handle errors and cleanup properly
• View your live session in Steel's session viewer

To run it:

1. Create a .env file in the examples/steel-selenium-starter directory:

STEEL_API_KEY=your_api_key_here

2. Replace your_api_key_here with your Steel API key. Don't have one? Get a free key at app.steel.dev/settings/api-keys

3. From the same directory, run the command:

python main.py

Writing your automation

Find this section in main.py:

# ============================================================
# Your Automations Go Here!
# ============================================================

# Example automation (you can delete this)
driver.get('https://news.ycombinator.com')
# ... rest of example code

You can replace the code here with whatever automation scripts you want to run.

Configuration

The template includes common Steel configurations you can enable:

session = client.sessions.create(
    use_proxy=True,              # Use Steel's proxy network
    session_timeout=1800000,     # 30 minute timeout (default: 15 mins)
)

Note: Certain features like captcha solving, proxies, and cookie management are not supported with selenium sessions yet. Check out the docs for more details on this here.

Error handling

The template includes error handling and cleanup:

try:
    # Your automation code
finally:
    # Cleanup runs even if there's an error
    if driver:
        driver.quit()
    if session:
        client.sessions.release(session.id)

Support

• Steel Documentation
• API Reference
• Discord Community