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I am coding a web scraper using Perl with the `Selenium::Remote::Driver module.

I have experimented with the Selenium WebDriver, X virtual frame buffer (Xvfb) and a headless Firefox instance on Debian 8 VPS and this combination works quite well.

But I am facing the fact that the client for which the program is created has access to a shared hosting Linux account that has no root access.

I am wondering whether it is possible to install and run Selenium WebDriver (and the other components like Xvfb) under such an account.

If not I am interested in alternative approaches to run Selenium and let a Perl script connect to this server.

For example, I could install Selenium WebDriver on my virtual private server (VPS) and let the client connect to this instance.

Is this feasible and what about security in such a scenario (the Driver would have to be accessible from the internet in this case).

Borodin
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Bloehdian
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  • Do you have permissions at all to bring code libraries onto the machine? I'm guessing you don't have an IDE and can't install one or setup path variables? – mutt Mar 09 '17 at 22:33
  • Do either of these posts help? http://stackoverflow.com/q/5782055, http://stackoverflow.com/q/25914877 – ThisSuitIsBlackNot Mar 09 '17 at 22:36
  • Have you considered running it in a `virtualenv`? You can install pip packages into it without root. – crookedleaf Mar 09 '17 at 22:47
  • @ThisSuitIsBlackNot: Unfortunately not. The solutions presented in these posts rely on the possibility to install something as root. In my case this is not given at all. – Bloehdian Mar 15 '17 at 23:00
  • @crookedleaf: I guess that at least virtualenv has to be installed using root access. This is not possible in this project. – Bloehdian Mar 15 '17 at 23:03
  • @Bloehdian What has to be installed as root? You should be able to install Firefox, Xvfb, etc. all as a regular user. You can't use the package manager, but you can still build things from source or install pre-compiled binaries in your home directory. – ThisSuitIsBlackNot Mar 15 '17 at 23:04
  • @Bloehdian "virtualenv has to be installed using root access" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9348869/how-to-install-virtualenv-without-using-sudo – ThisSuitIsBlackNot Mar 15 '17 at 23:07

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