How to bypass reCAPTCHA using 2Captcha and Selenium in Python

Written 28 October 2021 •

CAPTCHAs are quite inconvenient. Even though they are supposed to protect us, they take up a lot of our time. Imagine filling out a 5-minute form only to have to redo the process because you got the obnoxious CAPTCHA wrong. But there is a way out: 2captcha

What are CAPTCHA's?

First and foremost, CAPTCHA is an acronym that stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart." It is simply a test to determine whether you are a person or a machine. CAPTCHAs help to protect websites from ad spammers who promote their schemes in website comments. Administrators can weed out spammers who attempt to automate their operations by requiring all users to negotiate the CAPTCHA authentication.

Why are they annoying?

First of all, they are great, but they do become annoying when it becomes hard for you, the human, to solve them.

What is 2Captcha?

2Captcha was created to connect clients that needed to recognise a large number of captchas in real time. In a nutshell, they are a company that helps you answer those pesky Captchas. Though there are numerous CAPTCHA solving services accessible, 2Captcha is by far the finest because it solves captchas quickly. It's the main tool I use to solve captchas, and I'll teach you how to utilise 2Captha with Selenium to solve captchas in Python.

How 2Captcha Works

In order for 2Captcha to solve a Captcha for you, it requires some data. So, here's how it works.

You submit data to their API endpoint. The data contains the sitekey, page url, 2captcha key and method. The sitekey contains code which is used to invoke the Captcha service on the page. The page url refers to the url of the page which contains the catpcha. The 2captcha key refers to the api key which you obtain from 2Captcha and the method tells 2captcha how to solve the captcha.
Someone on the endpoint receives your Captcha with the details
You keep on polling the endpoint till you Captcha is solved
The results is then returned to you

How To Solve Captcha's Using 2Captcha in Python

Installing the Packages

First of all, you need to have the Python language installed on your computer. Then, we install the selenium package. Selenium automates web browsers and it's going to help us to solve the captcha. Open your terminal and type in pip install selenium. Then, we install requests, (pip install requests) which will enable us to make http requests to the 2Captcha end point. After everything has finished installing, you then need to install Chrome browser driver. You can download it here.

Starting Selenium

from selenium import webdriver

driver_path = "C:\Program Files (x86)\chromedriver_win32\chromedriver.exe"
brave_path = "C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\Application\brave.exe"

option = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
option.binary_location = brave_path

browser = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=driver_path, chrome_options=option)

browser.get("https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo")

So in the snippet above, we import the webdriver from Selenium. The driver_path and brave_path variables hold the path to the chrome driver file and the brave browser file respectively.

Then, the option variable is useful if we want to give extra options to the browser, like, for example, starting it in incognito mode. The browser variable then creates the browser instance. The browser.get function opens the browser with a page containing a CAPTCHA which we are going to solve.

If you get an image like this after running the code, it means everything is working correctly.

Starting selenium

Extracting The Data From The Page

So as I said earlier, in order for 2Captcha to solve a Captcha for you, it requires some details and those details are in the page which contains the Captcha.

site_key_element = browser.find_element_by_css_selector('[data-sitekey]')
site_key = site_key_element.get_attribute("data-sitekey")
page_url = "https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo"
method = "userrecaptcha"
key = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

The site key is contained in an element with the attribute "data-sitekey" so we first find an element which contains the attribute. We then extract the site key value from the element. The page_url is just the URL to the page which contains the Captcha. The method tells 2Captha that the Captcha type is reCaptcha. The key is obtained from 2Captcha if you signup for their services.

Submit Data To Their Endpoint

import requests

url = "http://2captcha.com/in.php?key={}&method={}&googlekey={}&pageurl={}".format(key,method,site_key,page_url)
response = requests.get(url)

if response.text[0:2] != 'OK':
    quit('Service error. Error code:' + response.text)
captcha_id = response.text[3:]

In order to make a request to a server, we use the python requests module. So we imported the requests module and sent a request to the url that we created.

We then wait for a response. If the response is not equal to "OK," then it means something went wrong, so we close the program. Else, we store the capthca_id from the response.

Receiving Solved Captcha

After we have sent the request to their endpoint, we then keep on polling their server to check if they have finished solving our Captcha.

import time

token_url = "http://2captcha.com/res.php?key={}&action=get&id={}".format(key,captcha_id)

while True:
	time.sleep(10)
	response = requests.get(token_url)

	if response.text[0:2] == 'OK':
    	break

After submitting the request, we will be given a captcha id which we will use to check if our Captcha is solved. Since the Captcha won't be solved once it is sent, we need to use a while loop. Inside the loop, we wait for 10 seconds and make a request. If the response is "OK", we break the loop since it means the Captcha has been solved.

Inserting The Solved Captcha Into The Page

So after receiving the solved Captcha, we will then use Selenium to insert the solved Captcha into the page.

captha_results = response.text[3:]
browser.execute_script("""document.querySelector('[name="g-recaptcha-response"]').innerText='{}'""".format(captha_results))
browser.find_element_by_css_selector('[id="recaptcha-demo-submit"]').click()

So after we extract the solved Captcha, we then use Selenium to execute JavaScript that inserts the code in the form and then submits it.

The Whole Code

from selenium import webdriver
import requests
import time

driver_path = r"C:\Program Files (x86)\chromedriver_win32\chromedriver.exe"
brave_path = r"C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\Application\brave.exe"

option = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
option.binary_location = brave_path

browser = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=driver_path, options=option)

browser.get("https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo")

site_key_element = browser.find_element_by_css_selector('[data-sitekey]')

site_key = site_key_element.get_attribute("data-sitekey")
page_url = "https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo"
method = "userrecaptcha"
key = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

url = "http://2captcha.com/in.php?key={}&method={}&googlekey={}&pageurl={}".format(key,method,site_key,page_url)
response = requests.get(url)

if response.text[0:2] != 'OK':
    quit('Service error. Error code:' + response.text)
captcha_id = response.text[3:]



token_url = "http://2captcha.com/res.php?key={}&action=get&id={}".format(key,captcha_id)

while True:
	time.sleep(10)
	response = requests.get(token_url)

	if response.text[0:2] == 'OK':
    	break



captha_results = response.text[3:]
browser.execute_script("""document.querySelector('[name="g-recaptcha-response"]').innerText='{}'""".format(captha_results))
browser.find_element_by_css_selector('[id="recaptcha-demo-submit"]').click()