Using Selenium & Chrome to automatically download Blob files

The Selenium WebDriver is a brilliant way to programmatically interact with websites. You can write little Python scripts which can click around inside browser windows and do "stuff".

I use it to download a file generated by a Javascript Blob and automatically save it to disk. Here's how.

Set up the WebDriver

After you've installed Selenium and the Chrome WebDriver, this is the standard boilerplate to use it in Python:

 Python 3from selenium import webdriver 

from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

Set Up Chrome

You can pass whatever options and arguments you need - I use it in headless mode which means it doesn't display a window.

 Python 3chrome_options = Options()

chrome_options.add_argument('--headless=new')

chrome_options.add_argument('--window-size=1920,1080')

Set where to save the files

These options force the blob to download automatically to a specific location. Note There is no way to set the default file name.

 Python 3chrome_options.add_experimental_option("prefs", {

        "download.default_directory"  : "/tmp/",

        "download.prompt_for_download": False,

        "download.directory_upgrade"  : True,

})

Download the file

This opens the browser, finds the link, then clicks on it. Your XPATH will be different to mine.

 Python 3driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chrome_options)

driver.get("https://example.com")



download_button = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//button[@data-integration-name='button-download-data-csv']")

download_button.click()

Rename from the default name

As mentioned, there's no way to set a default file name. But if you know what the file is going to be called, you can rename after it has been downloaded.

 Python 3time.sleep(2) # Wait until the file has been downloaded. Increase if it is a big file

os.rename("/tmp/example.csv", "/home/me/newfile.csv")



#       Stop the driver

driver.quit()

And there you go. Stick that in a script and you can automatically download and rename Blob URls.