How to login a forum using Selenium with Python

Question

I’m trying to use Selenium and PhantomJS for headless browsing to login a forum.Below is the code I used using Firefox and then change it to PhantomJS

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()

base_url = "http://6atxfootball.vbulletin.net/"

verificationErrors = []

accept_next_alert = True

driver.get(base_url)

driver.find_element_by_id("lnkLoginSignupMenu").click()

driver.find_element_by_id("idLoginUserName").clear()

driver.find_element_by_id("idLoginUserName").send_keys("USERNAME_HERE")

driver.find_element_by_id("idLoginPassword").clear()

driver.find_element_by_id("idLoginPassword").send_keys("PASSWORD_HERE ")

driver.find_element_by_id("idLoginBtn").click()

It shows an error is “NoSuchElementException:”.

driver.find_element_by_id("idLoginUserName").clear()

does this mean there’s no such an element when it’s opened by PhantomJS()?

I also tried to save the content also by PhantomJS() as a file and see what’s happening:

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()

base_url = "http://6atxfootball.vbulletin.net/"

verificationErrors = []

accept_next_alert = True

driver.get(base_url)

content=driver.page_source

cleaner=clean.Cleaner()

content=cleaner.clean_html(content)    

with open('6atxfootball.html','w') as f:

   f.write(content.encode('utf-8'))

   doc=LH.fromstring(content)

the “6atxfootball.html” shows there isn’t any form to fill.

Answer 1

You should try to directly log in to the url of the iframe, that is http://6atxfootball.vbulletin.net/auth/login-form. I think it's because it's inside an iframe. It would not be surprising that PhantomJS have some difficulties to find your element.