Python Automation With Selenium Part 1: Building an Instagram Bot (2021 Updated)

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Video transcript:

hey guys logo to the video today I'll be showing you how to use Python and selenium to automate Instagram by making an instrument bot so the first thing that we need to do is download Python if you don't have it installed alright so for that I can open a new chrome window go to Python org go to the downloads page and you can get the live version here secondly we're going to need to selenium for that we can go to selenium dev and again go to the downloads page and get away as freshman here now selenium is what's going to be power in our project today and basically what it is is it automates browsers and in order to use selenium we're gonna need a web driver so for that we're going to look up webdriver for Chrome and go to the first link and right now home page you can download the version of Chrome driver that you need so the version will correspond to the version of Chrome that you have so to find out which version that is you can go to settings go to a boat Chrome and you'll see it right here alright now we're ready to start coding alright so the first thing you're gonna want to do is create a folder where you want to store this project for me I'm going to be putting it in the YouTube folder on my machine here I have a terminal window I'm already into that folder as you can see we list all the items in here you'll see Slee and python now actually gonna make a new folder for this project to call this tutorial selenium and i'm going to CD into that project now since we're using python we're gonna want it to use a virtual environment so I'm gonna be using pip env if you don't have it already you can stall it by typing through install envy your on that I already have it installed so this will not do anything alright so there you go see it's installed and up today and secondly where you're going to want to create a new environment so to do that we can use pip easy hmm install that will create a new environment for us and if we go into the folder you'll see it created two files right here secondly we go we want to now start the shell to do that though thinking the shell and now we are in our virtual environment now we're going to install our one dependency for this project which is selenium we can do that by writing pip energy install selenium all right there you go now everything's set up for this project now we're going to want to make a Python file so we can do that directly from the terminal with touch and I'm going to name this font dot pi there we go and now we can open this in our editor alright so we're going to be editing Assadi bot py file so the first thing that we want to do is import webdriver from selenium next we're just going to write some standard python boilerplate code so we can get up and running all right so basically what this is doing is when we run the program it will check this first this will execute a strip so it will run the main method which will instantiate a variable named my bot to class spot and then it will initiate the init function of class bot which for now all that is doing is printing it works so we can test that by simply writing Python but py you know see yet it works all right so similarly how we declare a variable my bot to be equal to this class bot we can say for webdriver so we can say self dot driver which is our variable this could be anything you want we're going to make that equal to webdriver dot roam next we can call functions that webdriver gives us so to call this we need to write again so got driver dot you'll see there are a bunch of different functions here that we can use one we're gonna want to use it get see right there and the definition of get is it loads a webpage in the current browser session so for this like I said we're going to using Instagram so let's go grab the Instagram URL copy that and paste it in here as a string literal all right so now if we run this file again it should get this URL one thing to note is if you run this it will work but it will close the browser right after it finishes so to see that it's working I'm going to add - I which is interactive mode so after it finishes executing it will the browser will remain open there you go so if we right-click and inspect you'll see we get all the code behind the webpage now let's do it again and you can see this code right here corresponds to this input so we want to get this element in Python right so what we're going to do that is by right-clicking and hit copy and copy XPath so this is the path to get to this element and we can grab that in here by using so dot driver dot find and you'll see those bunch of different ways going to find that element you find about class name by CSS select your ID but the one we're using is XPath similar to get we can pass in like that and boom there you go so after we get it we want to send our username in right so the way we're gonna do that is by using the send keys method so we can type self driver dot send underscore keys you can send it whatever we want so let's see I'll send it my easy way and one thing to note before we run this if we run this it will fail because it will execute this instruction here but before Instagram is actually loaded it will execute this line so this will fail even though it's there it will fail because Instagram is not loaded yet so it will think it's not there so to fix that we can use a Python function to sleep so we can import that time so now it will execute this line and then it will do nothing for five seconds and then it will execute this line so let's run that see what we get nice ringing error no attribute send keys ah yes I need to initialize this to a variable let's call this use their name input equals that and then we're going to instead of self driver to send keys we want to send the keys to that variable try that again and there you go you can see our user name is in there so next we're going to send our password and we can do it the same way we can just inspect speaking to grab the XPath and we can do the same thing to the different user name we'll call this password book I'll set that equal to the self driver judge find element by XPath and then send keys we're gonna send our password but we want to keep this password to secret so what we can do is we can send password like this and input this for another file so let's make a new file call this secret stuff PI and we're gonna make a variable PW and set that equal to your password so enter your password here or from speakers import password now we can pass that into there so let's run this and see if it works and there you go we have the username and we have the password so the final step is to actually click login so just like we've been doing to get the X code and here we gotta be careful when we right click and hit inspect it brings us to this did right here well this isn't actually what we want to click what we want to click is this bind so let's copy that expand as opposed to copying the did XPath I'm going to click it all we're going to do is call another function dot click and this will click it for us let's see if that works there you go we can see it clicked it for us and we are in so now we have this pop-up that comes up and we want to click not now on this so just like how we click the submit button we can click not now you and there we go looks like it worked alright so in the next video we'll continue to dive deeper into this if you enjoy this video just give it a like and share and I'll see you the next one