Develop Reference

Selenium Alternatives for Google Cloud VM instance?

Are there any alternatives to Selenium that don't require a web driver or browser to operate? I recently moved my code over to a Google Cloud VM instance, and when I run it there are multiple errors. I've been trying to get it to work for hours but just can't (no luck with PhantomJS, Chrome and GeckoDriver - tried re-downloading browsers, editing the sources.list file e.c.t.).
The page I'm web scraping uses JavaScript to load in numbers, which I was I initially chose Selenium. Everything else works perfectly though!

You could simply use the request library.
https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master/
https://anaconda.org/anaconda/requests
You would then need to send a GET or POST request to the server.
If you do not know how to generate a proper POST request, simply try to "record" it.
If you have chrome, got to the page you want to navigate, press F12, navigate to the "Network" section and write method:POST into the filter.
Further info here:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/39661536/11971785
At first it is a bit more confusing than selenium, but once you understand it its waaaay better in my opinion.
Also the Java values shown on the page can usually be simply read out of the java code which is returned by your request.
No web driver or anything required and a lot more stable and customizable.

I get site blocking and captcha when using Python Selenium webdriver [duplicate]

How can I bypass the Google CAPTCHA using Selenium and Python?
When I try to scrape something, Google give me a CAPTCHA. Can I bypass the Google CAPTCHA with Selenium Python?
As an example, it's Google reCAPTCHA. You can see this CAPTCHA via this link: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo

To start with using Selenium's Python clients, you should avoid solving/bypass Google CAPTCHA.
Selenium
Selenium automates browsers. Now, what you want to achieve with that power is entirely up to individuals, but primarily it is for automating web applications through browser clients for testing purposes and of coarse it is certainly not limited to that.
CAPTCHA
On the other hand, CAPTCHA (the acronym being ...Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart...) is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine if the user is human.
So, Selenium and CAPTCHA serves two completely different purposes and ideally shouldn't be used to achieve any interrelated tasks.
Having said that, reCAPTCHA can easily detect the network traffic and identify your program as a Selenium driven bot.
Generic Solution
However, there are some generic approaches to avoid getting detected while web scraping:
The first and foremost attribute a website can determine your script/program by is through your monitor size. So it is recommended not to use the conventional Viewport.
If you need to send multiple requests to a website, keep on changing the User Agent on each request. Here you can find a detailed discussion on Way to change Google Chrome user agent in Selenium?
To simulate humanlike behavior, you may require to slow down the script execution even beyond WebDriverWait and expected_conditions inducing time.sleep(secs). Here you can find a detailed discussion on How to sleep Selenium WebDriver in Python for milliseconds
This use case
However, in a couple of use cases we were able to interact with the reCAPTCHA using Selenium and you can find more details in the following discussions:
How to click on the reCAPTCHA using Selenium and Java
CSS selector for reCAPTCHA checkbok using Selenium and VBA Excel
Find the reCAPTCHA element and click on it — Python + Selenium
References
You can find a couple of related discussion in:
How can I make a Selenium script undetectable using GeckoDriver and Firefox through Python?
Is there a version of Selenium WebDriver that is not detectable?
tl; dr
How does reCAPTCHA 3 know I'm using Selenium/chromedriver?

In order to bypass the CAPTCHA when scraping Google, you have to manually solve a CAPTCHA and export the cookies Google gives you. Now, every time you open a Selenium WebDriver, make sure you add the cookies you exported. The GOOGLE_ABUSE_EXEMPTION cookie is the one you're looking for, but I would save all cookies just to be on the safe side.
If you want an additional layer of stability in your scrapes, you should export several cookies and have your script randomly select one of them each time you ping Google.
These cookies have a long expiration date so you wouldn't need to get new cookies every day.
For help on saving and loading cookies in Python and Selenium, you should check out this answer: How to save and load cookies using Python + Selenium WebDriver

Clear Browsing History, cached data, cookies and other site data
First Create an Google Account while you are in browser window opened by selenium.
Sign in to your account
wd.get("https://accounts.google.com/signin/v2/identifier?hl=en&passive=true&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F%3Fgws_rd%3Dssl&ec=GAZAmgQ&flowName=GlifWebSignIn&flowEntry=ServiceLogin");
Thread.sleep(2000);
wd.findElement(By.name("identifier")).sendKeys("Email"+Keys.ENTER);
Thread.sleep(3000);
wd.findElement(By.name("password")).sendKeys("Password"+Keys.ENTER);
Thread.sleep(5000);
Then Open any website that uses recaptcha tick on checkmark using this code
String framename=wd.findElement(By.tagName("iframe")).getAttribute("name");
wd.switchTo().frame(framename);
wd.findElement(By.xpath("//span[#id='recaptcha-anchor']")).click();
You won't find any Puzzles or anything.

Bypass as in solve it or bypass as in never get it at all?
To solve it:
sign up with 2captcha, capmonster cloud, deathbycaptcha, etc. and follow their instructions. They will give you a token that you pass with the form.
To never get it at all:
Make sure you have good IP reputation (most important for Cloudflare).
Make sure you have a good browser fingerprint (most important for Distil) - I recommend puppeteer + the stealth plugin.

Ok, so there is a simple python script to solve captcha for you.
It basically read the audio and then use google assistant to convert it into text and paste it.
It is only workable in audio captchas which is given the most case with imahe captcha V2
https://github.com/ohyicong/recaptcha_v2_solver
Disclaimer!
I do not write the script, i just get an idea of doing this but got this brother project so, thought to help others through this.

The simple solution is suspend the program for 10 seconds or more and then when the automated browser opens solve the reCAPTCHA on your own and then the program starts after 10 seconds and execute rest of the program like clicking submit button or other things

Getting the current url in the browser

I am trying to get the current url opened in my pc in any browser using python.
I tried selenium it worked but it opens up a new browser window. I only want to get the current url opened in the browser.
Any help would be appreciated.

use keylogger in python, that would easiest solution, orelse you should catch each and every packets in network.

Selenium isn't made for such purposes. It can be used to automate testing of websites or for website scraping. Selenium associated with a driver (like Chrome's driver for example) is just a fancy browser that let's you interact with it in a non-intrusive way.
If you need to interact with already running apps, you could attach to another process's memory and read stuff directly from there but it might be very messy.
Also, see: Interact with other programs using Python

How can I scrape a website without getting detected and bypassing reCAPTCHA using selenium webdriver through Python?

I know the webscraping and I have taken the data from different website and I am using python language and selenium webdriver chrome. But I call a website it is open front page and then I click or go any other page then website restrict me and website know that I am using automated chrome.

This may be because the website uses reCAPTCHA v3, which "allows you to verify if an interaction is legitimate without any user interaction". This means that they can identify if you are not a human without asking you to check the famous "I'm not a robot" box. That box is used in the former version of reCAPTCHA, v2.
Read more about reCAPTCHA here: https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/versions
I don't think it's possible to work around this with Selenium. And, as was already mentioned, web scraping is often illegal.

These days, websites can detect your program as a BOT pretty easily. Currently Google have 4(four) reCAPTCHA to choose and implement from when creating a new site.
reCAPTCHA v3
reCAPTCHA v2 ("I'm not a robot" Checkbox)
reCAPTCHA v2 (Invisible reCAPTCHA badge)
reCAPTCHA v2 (Android)
Solution
However there are some generic approaches to avoid getting detected while web-scraping:
The first and foremost attribute a website can determine your script/program is through your monitor size. So it is recommended not to use the conventional Viewport.
If you need to send multiple requests to a website keep on changing the User Agent on each request. Here you can find a detailed discussion on Way to change Google Chrome user agent in Selenium?
To simulate human like behavior you may require to slow down the script execution even beyond WebDriverWait and expected_conditions inducing time.sleep(secs). Here you can find a detailed discussion on How to sleep webdriver in python for milliseconds
Outro
See:
Unable to use Selenium to automate Chase site login
Selenium webdriver: Modifying navigator.webdriver flag to prevent selenium detection

Using Mechanize for python, need to be able to right click

My script logs in to my account, navigates the links it needs to, but I need to download an image. This seems to be easy enough to do using urlretrive. The problem is that the src attribute for the image contains a link which points it to the page which initiates a download prompt, and so my only foreseeable option is to right click and select 'save as'. I'm using mechanize and from what I can tell Mechanize doesn't have this functionality. My question is should I switch to something like Selenium?

Mechanize, last I checked, was pretty poorly maintained and documented. Selenium has a much more active community.
That being said: why do you need mechanize to do this? Why not just use urllib?

I would try to watch Chrome's network tab, and try to imitate the final request to get the image. If it turned out to be too difficult, then I would use selenium as you suggested.