Selenium: How to Inject/execute a Javascript in to a Page before loading/executing any other scripts of the page?

Question

I’m using selenium python webdriver in order to browse some pages. I want to inject a javascript code in to a pages before any other Javascript codes get loaded and executed. On the other hand, I need my JS code to be executed as the first JS code of that page. Is there a way to do that by Selenium?

I googled it for a couple of hours, but I couldn’t find any proper answer!

Asked By: Alex

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Source

Answer 1

If you want to inject something into the html of a page before it gets parsed and executed by the browser I would suggest that you use a proxy such as Mitmproxy.

Answered By: Jonathan

Answer 2

If you cannot modify the page content, you may use a proxy, or use a content script in an extension installed in your browser. Doing it within selenium you would write some code that injects the script as one of the children of an existing element, but you won’t be able to have it run before the page is loaded (when your driver’s get() call returns.)

String name = (String) ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript(
    "(function () { ... })();" ...

The documentation leaves unspecified the moment at which the code would start executing. You would want it to before the DOM starts loading so that guarantee might only be satisfiable with the proxy or extension content script route.

If you can instrument your page with a minimal harness, you may detect the presence of a special url query parameter and load additional content, but you need to do so using an inline script. Pseudocode:

 <html>
    <head>
       <script type="text/javascript">
       (function () {
       if (location && location.href && location.href.indexOf("SELENIUM_TEST") >= 0) {
          var injectScript = document.createElement("script");
          injectScript.setAttribute("type", "text/javascript");

          //another option is to perform a synchronous XHR and inject via innerText.
          injectScript.setAttribute("src", URL_OF_EXTRA_SCRIPT);
          document.documentElement.appendChild(injectScript);

          //optional. cleaner to remove. it has already been loaded at this point.
          document.documentElement.removeChild(injectScript);
       }
       })();
       </script>
    ...

Answered By: init_js

Answer 3

so I know it’s been a few years, but I’ve found a way to do this without modifying the webpage’s content and without using a proxy! I’m using the nodejs version, but presumably the API is consistent for other languages as well. What you want to do is as follows

const {Builder, By, Key, until, Capabilities} = require('selenium-webdriver');
const capabilities = new Capabilities();
capabilities.setPageLoadStrategy('eager'); // Options are 'eager', 'none', 'normal'
let driver = await new Builder().forBrowser('firefox').setFirefoxOptions(capabilities).build();
await driver.get('http://example.com');
driver.executeScript(`
  console.log('hello'
`)

That ‘eager’ option works for me. You may need to use the ‘none’ option.
Documentation: https://seleniumhq.github.io/selenium/docs/api/javascript/module/selenium-webdriver/lib/capabilities_exports_PageLoadStrategy.html

EDIT: Note that the ‘eager’ option has not been implemented in Chrome yet…

Answered By: Jacob

Answer 4

Since version 1.0.9, selenium-wire has gained the functionality to modify responses to requests. Below is an example of this functionality to inject a script into a page before it reaches a webbrowser.

import os
from seleniumwire import webdriver
from gzip import compress, decompress
from urllib.parse import urlparse

from lxml import html
from lxml.etree import ParserError
from lxml.html import builder

script_elem_to_inject = builder.SCRIPT('alert("injected")')

def inject(req, req_body, res, res_body):
    # various checks to make sure we're only injecting the script on appropriate responses
    # we check that the content type is HTML, that the status code is 200, and that the encoding is gzip
    if res.headers.get_content_subtype() != 'html' or res.status != 200 or res.getheader('Content-Encoding') != 'gzip':
        return None
    try:
        parsed_html = html.fromstring(decompress(res_body))
    except ParserError:
        return None
    try:
        parsed_html.head.insert(0, script_elem_to_inject)
    except IndexError: # no head element
        return None
    return compress(html.tostring(parsed_html))

drv = webdriver.Firefox(seleniumwire_options={'custom_response_handler': inject})
drv.header_overrides = {'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip'} # ensure we only get gzip encoded responses

Another way in general to control a browser remotely and be able to inject a script before the pages content loads would be to use a library based on a separate protocol entirely, eg: Chrome DevTools Protocol. The most fully featured I know of is playwright

Answered By: Mattwmaster58

Answer 5

Selenium has now supported Chrome Devtools Protocol (CDP) API, so , it is really easy to execute a script on every page load. Here is an example code for that:

driver.execute_cdp_cmd('Page.addScriptToEvaluateOnNewDocument', {'source': 'alert("Hooray! I did it!")'})

And it will execute that script for EVERY page load. More information about this can be found at:

Selenium documentation: https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/en/support_packages/chrome_devtools/
Chrome Devtools Protocol documentation: https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/tot/Page/#method-addScriptToEvaluateOnNewDocument

Answered By: Khanh Luong

Selenium: How to Inject/execute a Javascript in to a Page before loading/executing any other scripts of the page?

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