View on GitHub

Relenium

Selenium for R

Download this project as a .zip file Download this project as a tar.gz file

Dear relenium users,

We have noticed that other Selenium bindings have been developed and successfully contributed on CRAN (RSelenium). Aleix and me (Lluís) think that it doesn’t make much sense to have two Selenium bindings in the R community. As we have failed to contribute relenium and seleniumJars on CRAN, we encourage you to switch to RSelenium. We will be updating Selenium JARS for a while but we will no longer improve relenium or fix any issues, neither try again to contribute it on CRAN. We thank all of you for the comments, improvements and ideas that have been shared with us. We have enjoyed developing relenium and we are happy that a Selenium binding is available in the R community. RSelenium is an rOpenSci package and we are sure that it will be well maintained.


Introduction

Selenium is a popular suite of tools specifically for automating web browsers. Selenium allows users to write tests in a number of popular programming languages including Java. The relenium package is intended to provide access to Selenium and use it to boost web navigation and to ease the path for web scraping in R.

Development

Some members of the Barcelona R user group are developing relenium. Right now, relenium is in beta testing. Some errors could be found and documentation is still being improved.

Installation

You can install relenium from github using the devtools package. A recent version of a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and Firefox web browser are required. seleniumJars and rJava R packages are also needed, you can get rJava from CRAN and seleniumJars from github.

install.packages("rJava")

require(devtools)

install_github('seleniumJars', 'LluisRamon')
install_github('relenium', 'LluisRamon')

In case you are using Windows you will also need rtools. In case R is trying to access on Intenet through a proxy, follow this SO question. If you have troubles with the installation, it is suggested to reinstall Java, RJava and relenium. Check that all of them, including R, correspond to the same version (32 or 64 bits).

Bugs and new features

To report technical problems with relenium, please file an issue on Github with a short reproducible example. Feedback is welcomed and any new features should be filed as issues as well.