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Because of delays with my scholarship payment, if this post is useful to you I kindly ask a minimal donation on Buy Me a Coffee. It shall be used to continue my Open Source efforts. The full explanation is here: A Personal Message from an Open Source Contributor.

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Motivation

Continuing with the previous post, here I expand the instructions for Windows and Linux (I do not have a Mac laptop to test on OS X).

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Required software

• Mozilla Firefox and GeckoDriver: web browser and remote control program
• RSelenium: R-Selenium integration
• rvest: HTML processing
• dplyr: to load the pipe operator (can be used later for data cleaning)
• purrr: iteration (i.e., repeated operations)

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Mozilla Firefox and GeckoDriver

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Windows

I installed Mozilla Firefox from the official website and followed the installer.

For GeckoDriver, I downloaded it from here for Windows 64-bit and saved “geckodriver.exe” to a new folder “C:”. Then, I had to add the folder to the PATH like this:

1. Press Win + S
2. Type “Environment variables”
3. Open “Edit the system environment variables”.
4. Click “Environment variables”.
5. In “System variables”, find and select “Path”, then click “Edit”.
6. Click “New” and add “C:” without quotes
7. Click OK to save.

Then restart RStudio and close PowerShell if it is open. Not installing GeckoDrive would only result in this error message in R: “Unable to create new service geckodriverservice.”

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Linux

I use Manjaro, so Firefox is the default browser.

To install GeckoDriver I used these commands:

wget https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases/download/v0.36.0/geckodriver-v0.36.0-linux64.tar.gz -O ~/Downloads/geckodriver.tar.gz
tar -xzf ~/Downloads/geckodriver.tar.gz -C ~/Downloads
rm ~/Downloads/geckodriver.tar.gz
sudo mv ~/Downloads/geckodriver /usr/local/bin/
geckodriver --version

the output should show “geckodriver 0.36.0”.

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RSelenium and Selenium Server

I installed RSelenium from the R console:

if (!require(RSelenium)) install.packages("RSelenium")

# or

remotes::install_github("ropensci/RSelenium")

I tried to start Selenium as it is mentioned in the official guide and it did not work.

I downloaded Selenium Server from this link.

For the rest of the packages:

if (!require(rvest)) install.packages("rvest")
if (!require(dplyr)) install.packages("dplyr")
if (!require(purrr)) install.packages("purrr")

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Running Selenium Server

These commands work on PowerShell (Windows) and sh/bash/zsh (Linux):

cd Downloads
java -jar selenium-server-standalone-3.9.1.jar

The Selenium Server instance has to be run every time before running the R code unless the terminal remains open.

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Controlling the Browser

From RStudio (same for an R terminal), I could control the browser from R:

library(RSelenium)
library(rvest)
library(dplyr)
library(purrr)

rmDr <- remoteDriver(port = 4444L, browserName = "firefox")

rmDr$open(silent = TRUE)

url <- "https://pacha.dev/blog"

rmDr$navigate(url)

This should display a new Firefox window and show my blog. The rest of the steps are the same as in the original post where I show practical examples.

I hope this is useful 🙂