Controlling Opera with Selenium

This is a quick guide on how to use Selenium to control Opera, e.g. from Python.

Requirements

• Opera 11.00 or newer (up to 12.18).
• Java (not sure about the minimum version; I used 8).
• Selenium server 2.41.0. According to the changelog, up to 2.45.0 should work, but newer versions either gave me strange errors or did not get any response from Opera.

Usage

Selenium already includes an Opera driver, so you can just start using it with any programming language.

Python (2.x)

First, install the selenium package. The version should match the Selenium server version. For example:

pip install selenium==2.41.0

You can then use it like this:

import selenium.webdriver

Caps = selenium.webdriver.DesiredCapabilities.OPERA.copy()
Caps["opera.binary"] = operaPath
Driver = selenium.webdriver.Opera(
  executable_path=seleniumServerPath,
  desired_capabilities=Caps
)

Driver.get("https://www.opera.com/")

for i in Driver.find_elements_by_tag_name("a"):
  URL = i.get_attribute("href")
  if URL:
    print(URL)

Driver.close()

Replace operaPath with the full path and name of the Opera executable (this might only be necessary if your installation is a "portable" one) and seleniumServerPath with the full path and name of the Selenium standalone server JAR file.

Make sure that java.exe is accessible through your PATH variable and run the script. You should see an Opera window open, navigate to the specified page, and the URLs of all linked pages printed to the console.

See also

• Source code and documentation of the Opera driver for Selenium. The last version of this is already included with Selenium, so you don't have to compile it yourself (but if you want to, you need Ant).