How do I enable ChromeDriver to use browser cache or local storage with selenium python

Question

I was trying to automate a website and it's a PWA. I need the caching data for this site as it takes too long to load, once loaded it's pretty fast. But every time I run my scripts chrome starts a new instance loading every resource from the beginning, how can I forcefully enable to use the cache or local storage data?

class ProductAdder:
    def __init__(self):
        self.url = 'https://testsite.com/'
        self.driver = webdriver.Chrome(PATH)
        self.driver.get(self.url)

    def login(self):
        wait = WebDriverWait(self.driver, 120)
        wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH,"//input[@name='email']"))).send_keys('[email protected]')
        wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH,"//input[@name='password']"))).send_keys('test')
        wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR,".MuiButton-label"))).click()



    def add(self):
        pass

if __name__ == '__main__':
    selenium = ProductAdder()
    selenium.login()

Answer 1

Yes, you are right, from Chrome capabilities documentations

Use custom profile (also called user data directory)
By default, ChromeDriver will create a new temporary profile for each session.

Therefor you need to create and load a custom profile by user-data-dir.

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("user-data-dir=/path/to/your/custom/profile");

In your case it could look something as follow.

class ProductAdder:
    def __init__(self):
        self.url = 'https://testsite.com/'
        options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
        # Path To Custom Profile
        options.add_argument("user-data-dir=C:\\Path\\To\\Custom\\Profile")
        self.driver = webdriver.Chrome(PATH, options=options)
        self.driver.get(self.url)

As a basic, but of course to be adapted to use implementation as you like. You can check loaded profile by browsing to chrome://version

It should also be OK use the options.add_argument('--profile-directory=<profile>') to load the profile.