Selenium Guide

Early Access

Connect Selenium to Steel for managed browser sessions.

Limited Feature Support

Selenium integration is in early stages and NOT at feature parity with Playwright/Puppeteer:

• No automatic CAPTCHA solving
• No custom proxy configurations
• Limited advanced session management
• No live session viewer support

Custom Connection Handler

Selenium requires a custom connection class to pass Steel headers:

import os
from selenium.webdriver.remote.remote_connection import RemoteConnection

class SteelRemoteConnection(RemoteConnection):
    def __init__(self, remote_server_addr: str, session_id: str):
        super().__init__(remote_server_addr)
        self._session_id = session_id

    def get_remote_connection_headers(self, parsed_url, keep_alive=False):
        headers = super().get_remote_connection_headers(parsed_url, keep_alive)
        headers.update({
            'steel-api-key': os.environ.get("STEEL_API_KEY"),
            'session-id': self._session_id
        })
        return headers

Connect to Steel

import os
from steel import Steel
from selenium import webdriver

client = Steel(steel_api_key=os.getenv('STEEL_API_KEY'))

def main():
    # Create session with is_selenium=True
    session = client.sessions.create(is_selenium=True)

    # Connect via custom handler
    driver = webdriver.Remote(
        command_executor=SteelRemoteConnection(
            remote_server_addr='http://connect.steelbrowser.com/selenium',
            session_id=session.id
        ),
        options=webdriver.ChromeOptions()
    )

    driver.get('https://example.com')
    print(driver.title)

    # Cleanup
    driver.quit()
    client.sessions.release(session.id)

main()

Key Differences from Playwright/Puppeteer

1. Must pass is_selenium=True when creating the session
2. Connects via http://connect.steelbrowser.com/selenium (HTTP, not WebSocket)
3. Requires custom RemoteConnection subclass for auth headers

Verification Checklist

• [ ] Install: pip install steel-sdk selenium
• [ ] Set STEEL_API_KEY environment variable
• [ ] Create SteelRemoteConnection class
• [ ] Test basic connection
• [ ] Confirm session cleanup