Getting Started

The easiest way to get started using Helium on Windows is to use the Helium console. It is a standalone Windows application without any dependencies and doesn't even require installation.

You can download the Helium console from our Download page. Simply fill in your details and save the Zip file to a folder on your computer. Once the download is finished, extract the Zip archive and run the Helium.exe executable in the extracted location. That's it! We timed ourselves and managed to complete the whole process in 58 seconds, so it should be really quick to set up for you too.

The Helium console offers the same commands as the Helium Python bindings. For an overview of all available commands, please type help() into the Helium console or visit our API Documentation page.

If you have any questions or problems, please feel free to drop us a line on our contact page.

The first step in getting started with Helium for Java is to ensure that you have a JDK version 8 or higher installed. If you don't, you can for instance download and install jdk-8u111-windows-i586.exe from the official home page here. Once you have done this, please ensure that the path of your JDK's bin/ directory is on your PATH environment variable.

Next, please download Helium from our download page (be sure that Java is selected as the language and Windows as the Operating System). You should get a file called helium-java-x.x.x-win.zip, where x.x.x represents Helium's version number (eg. 1.3.5). Extract this archive to a folder on your computer, for examplec:\Tools. You should get a directory similar to the following:

You can now already see Helium in action! In the examples/Google/ subdirectory of the Helium directory shown above, you will find a run.bat batch file. If you run this file, you will see Helium perform a Google search:

To get started experimenting immediately, you can use your favorite text editor to edit the file Google.java in the example directory. Feel free to make any changes. The example is there solely for educational purposes and in the worst case you still have the original code in the Zip archive. Once you have saved your changes, you can execute run.bat again to see their effect.

Many people will prefer to use an IDE such as IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse to edit their scripts. Whichever tool you use, all you need to do is to ensure that the JAR files in Helium's heliumlib/ subdirectory are on your classpath. The run.bat file mentioned above is a good example of this. It consists of the following lines:

javac -cp ".;../../heliumlib/*" Google.java
java -cp ".;../../heliumlib/*" Google

The crucial part is "../../heliumlib/*". It instructs Java to include all JAR files in the heliumlib/ directory on the classpath. Please note that Java is very specific about the format of this wildcard inclusion: It needs to be surrounded by quotation marks "..." and must end in a single * (eg. ../../heliumlib/*.jar would not be valid).

Once you have executed the above steps, you are all set to automate web sites with Helium! For inspiration, you may want to look at some of the other examples on our Examples page or dive straight in with the list of Helium's API commands. If you encounter any problems, please do not hesitate to drop us a line on our contact page :-)

The first step in getting started with Helium for Python is to ensure that you have Python installed. If you don't, please download and install it from the official download page. While Helium works with any Python version >= 2.6, we recommend using Python 3 or later for new web automation projects.

Next, please download the helium-python-x.x.x.zip file from our download page, where x.x.x represents Helium's version number (eg. 1.3.5). Extract this archive to a folder on your computer, for examplec:\Tools. You should get a directory similar to the following:

The final configuration step is to update your PYTHONPATH environment variable. Please set it to the following value, replacing C:\Tools by whichever directory you extracted helium-x.x.x.zip into in a previous step:

Adding Helium's heliumlib/ directory to the PYTHONPATH

And that's it! To verify you have done everything correctly, start python.exe from the directory you installed Python into. You should get a window similar to the following:

Then, enter the following commands:

from helium.api import *
start_chrome()
go_to("google.com")
write("Helium")
press(ENTER)
click("Wikipedia")

If you don't have Google Chrome installed, replace start_chrome() in the above by start_firefox() or start_ie().

Issuing commands to start Chrome or Internet Explorer may cause the Windows Firewall to ask you for permission to access the internet:

In that case, please grant access by clicking on the "Allow access" button.

This should get you started. If not, or if you have any questions or problems, please feel free to drop us a line on our contact page :-)

Java
Python

The first step in getting started with Helium for Java is to ensure that you have a JDK version 8 or higher installed. Once you have done this, please also make sure that you can execute the commands javac and java in your Linux terminal.

Next, please download Helium from our download page (be sure that Java is selected as the language and Linux as the Operating System). You should get a file called helium-java-x.x.x-osx.zip, where x.x.x represents Helium's version number (eg. 1.3.5). Extract this archive to a folder on your computer. For example, if you extracted to your home directory, then you should get a folder similar to the following:

You can now already see Helium in action! In the examples/Google/ subdirectory of the Helium directory shown above, you will find a run.sh batch file. If you run this file, you will see Helium perform a Google search. To run the script, you need to open the Terminal.app, navigate to the Helium Google example directory, type ./run.sh and press ENTER:

Some people will prefer to use an IDE such as IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse to edit their scripts. Whichever tool you use, all you need to do is to ensure that the JAR files in Helium's heliumlib/ subdirectory are on your classpath. The run.sh file mentioned above is a good example of this. It consists of the following lines:

javac -cp ".:../../heliumlib/*" Google.java
java -cp ".:../../heliumlib/*" Google

Next, please download the helium-python-x.x.x.zip file from our download page, where x.x.x represents Helium's version number (eg. 1.3.5). Extract this archive to a folder on your computer, for example~/Tools. You should get a directory similar to the following:

The final configuration step is to update your PYTHONPATH environment variable. To set the variable, you need to run the Terminal application. Please set it to the following value, replacing ~/Tools by whichever directory you extracted helium-x.x.x.zip into in a previous step:

If you wish to set the PYTHONPATH variable permanently, execute the following commands in a Terminal window:

echo "export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/your/helium-python-x.x.x/heliumlib" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Be sure to replace /path/to/your/helium-python-x.x.x/heliumlib by the actual path to your heliumlib folder.

And that's it! To verify you have done everything correctly, start a Terminal window and type python followed by Enter. Then, enter the commands below. If you don't have Google Chrome installed, replace start_chrome() by start_firefox():

from helium.api import *
start_chrome()

A browser window should open and your Terminal should display something similar to the following:

If you run helium for the first time, you might get the following dialog displayed:

Simply click Allow in order to ensure the correct behaviour of the library.

You can now start experimenting with Helium! For instance, try typing in the following commands:

from helium.api import *
start_chrome()
go_to("google.com")
write("Helium")
press(ENTER)
click("Wikipedia")

If you have any questions or problems, please feel free to get in touch with us on our contact page. :-)

Java
Python

Next, please download Helium from our download page (be sure that Java is selected as the language and Linux as the Operating System). You should get a file called helium-java-x.x.x-linux.zip, where x.x.x represents Helium's version number (eg. 1.3.5). Extract this archive to a folder on your computer. For example, if you extracted to your home directory, then you should get a folder similar to the following:

javac -cp ".:../../heliumlib/*" Google.java
java -cp ".:../../heliumlib/*" Google

Next, please download the file helium-python-x.x.x-linux.zip (x.x.x represents Helium's version number, eg. 1.3.5) from our download page.

Extract the downloaded Zip archive to a folder on your computer. For example, if you extracted to your home directory, then you should get a folder similar to the following:

The final configuration step is to update your PYTHONPATH environment variable. You can do this by typing the following command into your Linux shell. Please replace ~/helium-python-x.x.x/ by the the path you extracted Helium to in a previous step. Please also replace ~/.bash_profile by ~/.bashrc if you are on Ubuntu, or by ~/.zshenv if you are using Zsh.

echo 'export PYTHONPATH="~/helium-python-x.x.x/heliumlib:$PYTHONPATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile

Restart your shell so the path changes take effect:

exec $SHELL

And that's it! To verify you have done everything correctly, start python. You should get a window with contents similar to the following:

Then, enter the following commands:

from helium.api import *
start_chrome()
go_to("google.com")
write("Helium")
press(ENTER)
click("Wikipedia")

If you don't have Google Chrome installed, replace start_chrome() in the above by start_firefox().

This should get you started. If not, or if you have any questions or problems, please feel free to drop us a line on our contact page :-)