Ошибка modulenotfounderror no module named selenium

A common error you may encounter when using Python is modulenotfounderror: no module named ‘selenium’.

This error occurs when the Python interpreter cannot detect the Selenium library in your current environment.

This tutorial goes through the exact steps to troubleshoot this error for the Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

ModuleNotFoundError: no module named ‘selenium’

What is Selenium?

Selenium is a suite of tools for automating web browsers. You can use Selenium to automate web applications for testing purposes, though it is not only for testing.

The simplest way to install Selenium is to use the package manager for Python called pip. The following installation instructions are for the major Python version 3.

How to Install Selenium on Windows Operating System

First, you need to download and install Python on your PC. Ensure you select the install launcher for all users and Add Python to PATH checkboxes. The latter ensures the interpreter is in the execution path. Pip is automatically on Windows for Python versions 2.7.9+ and 3.4+.

You can check your Python version with the following command:

python3 --version

You can install pip on Windows by downloading the installation package, opening the command line and launching the installer. You can install pip via the CMD prompt by running the following command.

python get-pip.py

You may need to run the command prompt as administrator. Check whether the installation has been successful by typing.

pip --version

Selenium installation on Windows Using pip

To install Selenium, run the following command from the command prompt.

pip3 install selenium

How to Install Selenium on Mac Operating System using pip

Open a terminal by pressing command (⌘) + Space Bar to open the Spotlight search. Type in terminal and press enter. To get pip, first ensure you have installed Python3:

python3 --version

Python 3.8.8

Download pip by running the following curl command:

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py

The curl command allows you to specify a direct download link. Using the -o option sets the name of the downloaded file.

Install pip by running:

python3 get-pip.py

From the terminal, use pip3 to install Selenium:

pip3 install selenium

How to Install Selenium on Linux Operating Systems

All major Linux distributions have Python installed by default. However, you will need to install pip. You can install pip from the terminal, but the installation instructions depend on the Linux distribution you are using. You will need root privileges to install pip. Open a terminal and use the commands relevant to your Linux distribution to install pip.

Installing pip for Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint

sudo apt install python-pip3

Installing pip for CentOS 8 (and newer), Fedora, and Red Hat

sudo dnf install python-pip3

Installing pip for CentOS 6 and 7, and older versions of Red Hat

sudo yum install epel-release

sudo yum install python-pip3

Installing pip for Arch Linux and Manjaro

sudo pacman -S python-pip

Installing pip for OpenSUSE

sudo zypper python3-pip

Selenium installation on Linux with Pip

Once you have installed pip, you can install Selenium using:

pip3 install selenium

Installing Selenium Using Anaconda

First, to create a conda environment to install PIL.

conda create -n selenium python=3.6 

Then activate the selenium container. You will see “selenium” in parentheses next to the command line prompt.

source activate selenium

Now you’re ready to install Selenium using conda.

Anaconda is a distribution of Python and R for scientific computing and data science. You can install Anaconda by going to the installation instructions. Once you have installed Anaconda and created your conda environment, you can install Selenium using one of the following commands:

conda install -c conda-forge selenium

Check Selenium Version

Once you have successfully installed Selenium, you can check the version of Selenium. If you used pip to install Selenium, you can use pip show from your terminal.

pip show selenium

Name: selenium
Version: 4.1.0

Second, within your python program, you can import selenium and then reference the __version__ attribute:

import selenium

print(selenium.__version__)

4.1.0

If you used conda to install Selenium, you could check the version using the following command:

conda list -f selenium

# Name                    Version                   Build  Channel
selenium                  3.141.0         py36hfa26744_1002    conda-forge

Summary

Congratulations on reading to the end of this tutorial. The modulenotfounderror occurs if you misspell the module name, incorrectly point to the module path or do not have the module installed in your Python environment. If you do not have the module installed in your Python environment, you can use pip to install the package. However, you must ensure you have pip installed on your system. You can also install Anaconda on your system and use the conda install command to install Selenium.

Go to the online courses page on Python to learn more about Python for data science and machine learning.

For further reading on missing modules in Python, go to the article: How to Solve Python ModuleNotFoundError: no module named ‘urllib2’.

Have fun and happy researching!

Quick Fix: Python raises the ImportError: No module named 'selenium' when it cannot find the library selenium. The most frequent source of this error is that you haven’t installed selenium explicitly with pip install selenium. Alternatively, you may have different Python versions on your computer, and selenium is not installed for the particular version you’re using.

Problem Formulation

You’ve just learned about the awesome capabilities of the selenium library and you want to try it out, so you start your code with the following statement:

import selenium

This is supposed to import the selenium library into your (virtual) environment. However, it only throws the following ImportError: No module named selenium:

>>> import selenium
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#6>", line 1, in <module>
    import selenium
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'selenium'

Solution Idea 1: Install Library selenium

The most likely reason is that Python doesn’t provide selenium in its standard library. You need to install it first!

Before being able to import the selenium module, you need to install it using Python’s package manager pip. Make sure pip is installed on your machine.

To fix this error, you can run the following command in your Windows shell:

$ pip install selenium

This simple command installs selenium in your virtual environment on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. It assumes that your pip version is updated. If it isn’t, use the following two commands in your terminal, command line, or shell (there’s no harm in doing it anyways):

$ python -m pip install --upgrade pip
$ pip install selenium

💡 Note: Don’t copy and paste the $ symbol. This is just to illustrate that you run it in your shell/terminal/command line.

Solution Idea 2: Fix the Path

The error might persist even after you have installed the selenium library. This likely happens because pip is installed but doesn’t reside in the path you can use. Although pip may be installed on your system the script is unable to locate it. Therefore, it is unable to install the library using pip in the correct path.

To fix the problem with the path in Windows follow the steps given next.

Step 1: Open the folder where you installed Python by opening the command prompt and typing where python

Step 2: Once you have opened the Python folder, browse and open the Scripts folder and copy its location. Also verify that the folder contains the pip file.

Step 3: Now open the Scripts directory in the command prompt using the cd command and the location that you copied previously.

Step 4: Now install the library using pip install selenium command. Here’s an analogous example:

After having followed the above steps, execute our script once again. And you should get the desired output.

🌍 Recommended Tutorial: How to Install Selenium on PyCharm?

Other Solution Ideas

• The ModuleNotFoundError may appear due to relative imports. You can learn everything about relative imports and how to create your own module in this article.
• You may have mixed up Python and pip versions on your machine. In this case, to install selenium for Python 3, you may want to try python3 -m pip install selenium or even pip3 install selenium instead of pip install selenium
• If you face this issue server-side, you may want to try the command pip install --user selenium
• If you’re using Ubuntu, you may want to try this command: sudo apt install selenium
• You can check out our in-depth guide on installing selenium here.
• You can also check out this article to learn more about possible problems that may lead to an error when importing a library.

Understanding the “import” Statement

import selenium

In Python, the import statement serves two main purposes:

• Search the module by its name, load it, and initialize it.
• Define a name in the local namespace within the scope of the import statement. This local name is then used to reference the accessed module throughout the code.

What’s the Difference Between ImportError and ModuleNotFoundError?

What’s the difference between ImportError and ModuleNotFoundError?

Python defines an error hierarchy, so some error classes inherit from other error classes. In our case, the ModuleNotFoundError is a subclass of the ImportError class.

You can see this in this screenshot from the docs:

You can also check this relationship using the issubclass() built-in function:

>>> issubclass(ModuleNotFoundError, ImportError)
True

Specifically, Python raises the ModuleNotFoundError if the module (e.g., selenium) cannot be found. If it can be found, there may be a problem loading the module or some specific files within the module. In those cases, Python would raise an ImportError.

If an import statement cannot import a module, it raises an ImportError. This may occur because of a faulty installation or an invalid path. In Python 3.6 or newer, this will usually raise a ModuleNotFoundError.

Related Videos

The following video shows you how to resolve the ImportError:

The following video shows you how to import a function from another folder—doing it the wrong way often results in the ModuleNotFoundError:

How to Fix “ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘selenium’” in PyCharm

If you create a new Python project in PyCharm and try to import the selenium library, it’ll raise the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/Users/.../main.py", line 1, in <module>
    import selenium
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'selenium'

Process finished with exit code 1

The reason is that each PyCharm project, per default, creates a virtual environment in which you can install custom Python modules. But the virtual environment is initially empty—even if you’ve already installed selenium on your computer!

Here’s a screenshot exemplifying this for the pandas library. It’ll look similar for selenium.

The fix is simple: Use the PyCharm installation tooltips to install Pandas in your virtual environment—two clicks and you’re good to go!

First, right-click on the pandas text in your editor:

Second, click “Show Context Actions” in your context menu. In the new menu that arises, click “Install Pandas” and wait for PyCharm to finish the installation.

The code will run after your installation completes successfully.

As an alternative, you can also open the Terminal tool at the bottom and type:

$ pip install selenium

If this doesn’t work, you may want to set the Python interpreter to another version using the following tutorial: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/2016.1/configuring-python-interpreter-for-a-project.html

You can also manually install a new library such as selenium in PyCharm using the following procedure:

• Open File > Settings > Project from the PyCharm menu.
• Select your current project.
• Click the Python Interpreter tab within your project tab.
• Click the small + symbol to add a new library to the project.
• Now type in the library to be installed, in your example Pandas, and click Install Package.
• Wait for the installation to terminate and close all popup windows.

Here’s an analogous example:

Here’s a full guide on how to install a library on PyCharm.

• How to Install a Library on PyCharm

audible-activator.py works well, it stops to work when runned from aax2mp3

EDIT:
./aax2mp3_easy.sh <user> <pass> <file> first run output tail is:

Requirement already satisfied: requests in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages 
Requirement already satisfied: selenium in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "audible-activator-feature_login_as_arg/audible-activator.py", line 8, in <module>
    from selenium import webdriver
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'selenium' 

sudo ./aax2mp3_easy.sh <user> <pass> <file> first run output tail is:

Requirement already satisfied: requests in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
Requirement already satisfied: selenium in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "audible-activator-feature_login_as_arg/audible-activator.py", line 148, in
fetch_activation_bytes(username, password, options)
File "audible-activator-feature_login_as_arg/audible-activator.py", line 57, in fetch_activation_bytes
executable_path=chromedriver_path)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/chrome/webdriver.py", line 75, in init
desired_capabilities=desired_capabilities)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 154, in init
self.start_session(desired_capabilities, browser_profile)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 243, in start_session
response = self.execute(Command.NEW_SESSION, parameters)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 312, in execute
self.error_handler.check_response(response)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 242, in check_response
raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: unknown error: Chrome failed to start: exited abnormally
(Driver info: chromedriver=2.35.528139 (47ead77cb35ad2a9a83248b292151462a66cd881),platform=Linux 4.9.0-6-amd64 x86_64)

2018-03-03 02:19:06+0100 Decoding Player with auth code [*]...

Obviously no updates on both attempts