Automated backups with Python and Selenium

Since I don’t trust/understand automated backups of websites (in iv.lt for example) and I would rather backup things myself, know where they are stored and what is actually “backuped”, I create backups for my client sites manually.

The procedure is:

Open website Add username Add password .click Log in to client’s hosting provider’s dashboard panel .click on the needed server .click on directadmin panel .click on “atsargines kopijos” .click on “generuoti atsargine kopija” .close tab .click log out REPEAT 3x times

10 clicks at least

And I prefer to have at least one backup for every client at least once or twice a week for general maintenance.

When I want to do more modifications during the week, I like to make backups more often. Same 10 click procedure every time…

Since I have decided I want to slowly move away from Wordpress sites (the work itself is meh, drag and drop interfaces, have to learn php (when i prefer JS or Python), the competition is enormous (50 developers for one job), I don’t get to type nothing, losing my EMACS skills..) to learn more of real programming. Learn what you like the most, not what is needed most, right? And after half a year or so I realized that I prefer coding instead of drag and drop WordPress website building.

For a while now I have been thinking how cool it would be to automate some tasks. A year ago that is why I started to learn coding, so I can automate boring tasks!

So why not use Python to automate the process described above? It should be quite simple, right?

After a looooong period of not touching text editors, I installed emacs, configured it to my liking once again (my muscle memory surprises me).

I then found out about selenium and it can be used to interact with websites.

First I installed it and configured by watching some YouTube videos and when it finally didn’t work out as expected I directed all of my attention to the official docs - https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/getting-started.html

Then I insalled python venv to organize my packages better? But I already had them installed in my whole system, so kind of not needed I guess, but good to remember from the Django times and to know for the future.

Got a correct chrome driver. In my version it was - version 96.0.4664.45

Any deprecation errors were fixed by this - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69875125/find-element-by-commands-are-deprecated-in-selenium

• What is a webdriver
• How to open a webpage with Selenium
• How to login into a page with Selenium
• How to scroll with selenium - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20986631/how-can-i-scroll-a-web-page-using-selenium-webdriver-in-python
• how to click on all kinds of web elements with Selenium
• how to create a function with Python
• How to return a value from a function with Python
• How to reuse a returned function in another function with Python - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuNXiEDnM44 (had to also go back to my CodeInPlace course for a reference)
• How to use an external config file to store values for a python function to use (so the passwords and usernames I use in a function wouldn’t be visible to you ;> ) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdw0-QGq-z0
• How to run multiple python scripts from one one bash file

Doesn’t close browser windows after each script runs (not a biggie, everything still works, might fix later)