Thirtyfour: Web Browser Automation In Rust

Writing Your First Browser Automation Code

Before we begin, you'll need to install Rust. You can do so by using the rustup tool.

Let's start a new project. Open your terminal application and navigate to the directory where you usually put your source code. Then run these commands:

cargo new --bin my-automation-project
cd my-automation-project

You will see a Cargo.toml file and a src/ directory there already.

First, let's edit the Cargo.toml file in your editor (e.g. Visual Studio Code) and add some dependencies:

[dependencies]
thirtyfour = "0.34.0"
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }

Great! Now let's open src/main.rs and add the following code.

NOTE: Make sure you remove any existing code from main.rs.

Don't worry, we'll go through what it does soon.

/src/main.rs

use std::error::Error;

use thirtyfour::prelude::*;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error + Send + Sync>> {
    let caps = DesiredCapabilities::chrome();
    let driver = WebDriver::new("http://localhost:9515", caps).await?;
    // Navigate to https://wikipedia.org.
    driver.goto("https://wikipedia.org").await?;
    let elem_form = driver.find(By::Id("search-form")).await?;

    // Find element from element.
    let elem_text = elem_form.find(By::Id("searchInput")).await?;

    // Type in the search terms.
    elem_text.send_keys("selenium").await?;

    // Click the search button.
    let elem_button = elem_form.find(By::Css("button[type='submit']")).await?;
    elem_button.click().await?;

    // Look for header to implicitly wait for the page to load.
    driver.query(By::ClassName("firstHeading")).first().await?;
    assert_eq!(driver.title().await?, "Selenium - Wikipedia");

    // Always explicitly close the browser.
    driver.quit().await?;

    Ok(())
}

Next we need to make sure our webdriver is running.

Open your terminal application and run:

chromedriver

NOTE: This tutorial is currently set up for Chrome. If you'd prefer to run on Firefox instead, this is explained below.

Now open a new tab in your terminal and run your code:

cargo run

If everything worked correctly you should have seen a Chrome browser window open up, navigate to the "Selenium" article on Wikipedia, and then close again.

Running on Firefox

To run the code using Firefox instead, we first need to tell thirtyfour to use the configuration for Firefox. To do this, change the first to lines of your main function to this:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
    let caps = DesiredCapabilities::firefox();
    let driver = WebDriver::new("http://localhost:4444", caps).await?;
}

Now, instead of running chromedriver in your terminal, we'll run geckodriver instead:

geckodriver

And again, in the other tab, run your code again:

cargo run

If everything worked correctly, you should have seen the Wikipedia page open up on Firefox this time.

Congratulations! You successfully automated a web browser.