selenium-wire

What it is and what it does

Selenium Wire extends Selenium to give you access to the underlying HTTP and HTTPS requests made by the browser. Instead of just automating browser actions like clicking and typing, you can also inspect what requests the browser sends, see the responses it receives, and intercept or modify them on the fly—all while writing code that looks and feels like normal Selenium.

The package depends on 15 runtime libraries including selenium, pyOpenSSL for HTTPS decryption, and various compression and protocol handlers (h2, wsproto, brotli, zstandard). It requires OpenSSL to be installed on the system for HTTPS traffic inspection. The last release was in October 2022, and the repository has since been archived, meaning no new features or bug fixes are being developed.

Use it for:

• Inspect network traffic during browser automation to verify API calls and responses in integration tests.
• Intercept and modify request headers or parameters on the fly to test authentication or custom headers.
• Mock or block specific requests to test error handling or simulate unavailable backend services.
• Capture HAR archives of browser sessions for performance analysis or debugging.
• Verify that a web application makes expected requests to third-party services or analytics endpoints.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Extends Selenium's Python bindings to intercept, inspect, and modify HTTP/HTTPS requests and responses made by the browser during automated testing or scraping.

No. The package is abandoned as of January 2024 with no active maintenance. While it has low install friction and permissive licensing, the lack of ongoing support means security vulnerabilities, compatibility issues with newer Python or Selenium versions, and bugs will not be fixed. For new projects, consider actively maintained alternatives; for existing projects, plan a migration path.

Install

selenium-wire on PyPI

pip install selenium-wire

uv add selenium-wire

poetry add selenium-wire

Installing selenium-wire

Before you install

Low install friction with a pure-Python wheel distribution. However, the repository is archived and the package has been abandoned since January 2024, with no maintenance or security updates expected going forward.

License in practice

Licensed under MIT (permissive), allowing commercial and private use with minimal restrictions.

Quickstart

pip install selenium-wire

from seleniumwire import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get('https://www.google.com')

for request in driver.requests:
    if request.response:
        print(request.url, request.response.status_code)

OpenSSL must be installed on the system. A Selenium-compatible webdriver executable must be on your system PATH.

Verify before relying

• Whether the package continues to work reliably with current versions of Selenium 4.0.0+ and modern browser drivers despite abandonment.
• Compatibility status with Python 3.11+ given the latest release predates those versions.
• Whether OpenSSL system dependency is available and functional on all target platforms.

Package facts

Evidence: selenium_wire-5.1.0-py3-none-any.whl

Keywords: selenium-wire

Tags

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