Can't Download Pdf With Selenium Webdriver + Firefox

I have a selenium script that as part of it's execution needs to download a PDF, and the download is necessary as the PDF is used later on. I have used the profile preferences meth

Solution 1:

I solved this problem by passing the selenium session to the Python requests library and then fetching the PDF from there. I have a longer writeup in this StackOverflow answer, but here's a quick example:

import requests
from selenium import webdriver

pdf_url = "/url/to/some/file.pdf"

# setup webdriver with options 
driver = webdriver.Firefox(..options)

# do whatever you need to do to auth/login/click/etc.

# navigate to the PDF URL in case the PDF link issues a 
# redirect because requests.session() does not persist cookies
driver.get(pdf_url)

# get the URL from Selenium 
current_pdf_url = driver.current_url

# create a requests session
session = requests.session()

# add Selenium's cookies to requests
selenium_cookies = driver.get_cookies()
for cookie in selenium_cookies:
    session.cookies.set(cookie["name"], cookie["value"])

# Note: If headers are also important, you'll need to use 
# something like seleniumwire to get the headers from Selenium 

# Finally, re-send the request with requests.session
pdf_response = session.get(current_pdf_url)

# access the bytes response from the session
pdf_bytes = pdf_response.content