Why I'm switching from C# to Python with Selenium

I was recently tasked with automating our product's new login wrapper. This involved hitting the server UI page, redirecting to a login page and validating if the login succeeds or fails. Another requirement was to have the ability to run the tests in Azure DevOps pipelines.

I'm typically not a UI automation guy, I usually focus on Rest APIs and code in C#. So I started with Selenium C#. While it was fairly easy to automate the login steps I was immediately blocked when I found out that I need to support host headers to run the tests in a Kubernetes (K8S) environment. Well Selenium out of the box doesn't support host headers...

I stared searching for possible solutions and the best one I found by far was Seleniumwire. Seleniumwire supports access to underlying requests/responses. You can modify them and get http response codes as well. I felt like I was back in my API testing world! The only difference was that Seleniumwire only supports PYTHON and not C#. But I had to have the Seleniumwire functionality even if my Python skills were somewhat noob-ish.

Lets look how easy it is to set a host header with Seleniumwire

import pytest
from seleniumwire import webdriver

def test_isAlive(url, hostheader):
    web_driver = webdriver.Chrome()
    web_driver.maximize_window()
    # check to set host header    
    if hostheader != 'none':
            web_driver.header_overrides = {'Host' : hostheader}

    isAliveUrl = '/api/isAlive'
    UIEndpoint = url
    loginURL = UIEndpoint + isAliveUrl
    web_driver.get(loginURL)

Now the above isn't the whole script but you get the picture. This solved a huge issue that wasn't possible with Selenium C#. Note that I check for a host header value of "none" if I don't want to use a host header.

Another cool Seleniumwire feature is to grab an http response code which I can then use in an assert to check that the page loaded. This can be an additional test to the builtin Selenium page load response check.

# Access requests via the `requests` attribute
    for request in web_driver.requests:
        if request.response:
            print(
                request.url,
                request.response.status_code,
                request.headers                
            )    

    assert request.response.status_code == 200

These Seleniumwire features might seem minor but they are actually huge helps in UI Automation. Selenium should get off of it's high "we need to act like a browser" horse and incorporate this library in all versions! Until they do I'm now a Python automation guy :)