What is the difference between WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup(); and System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver","G:\\chromedriver.exe"); when do we use either of the code. I'm a newbie. Please explain.
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver","G:\\chromedriver.exe");
The above statement is used to set the driver binaries of chromedriver, for this you need to download the chromedriver.exe file and then accordingly mention the path of chromedriver.exe in the System.setproperty statement, if your chrome version is updated, then you will have to again download the appropriate chromedriver.exe file again and then set the driver binaries to proceed further, similarly for firefox you will have to download firefoxdriver.exe and then use System.setProperty to set the driver binaries.
WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup()
This is an efficient way to set driver binaries without having to actually download the driver binaries, you can just add the webdrivermanager dependency in your maven project (pom.xml) file and then set the driver binaries using the above statement.
Webdrivermanager does the follwoing:
It checks the version of the browser installed in your machine (e.g. Chrome, Firefox).
It checks the version of the driver (e.g. chromedriver, geckodriver). If unknown, it uses the latest version of the driver.
It downloads the WebDriver binary if it is not present on the WebDriverManager cache (~/.m2/repository/webdriver by default).
WebDriverManager resolves the driver binaries for the browsers Chrome, Firefox, Opera, PhantomJS, Microsoft Edge, and Internet Explorer. For that, it provides several drivers managers for these browsers. These drivers managers can be used as follows
WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup();
WebDriverManager.firefoxdriver().setup();
To use any specific version of chromedriver, use the below statement:
WebDriverManager.chromedriver().version("2.26").setup();
What is the difference between
WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup(); and
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver","G:\\chromedriver.exe");
WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup()
That will automatically download (or update) the appropriate chromedriver/chromedriver.exe for you. (It is not part of Selenium, so you must install WebDriverManager to use it).
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver","G:\\chromedriver.exe");
That sets a property with the location of chromedriver.exe. Selenium client will use this to find the binary on your system. It assumes it already exists in that location.
Related
I am interested in getting the browser Version
I've two questions-
Question 1:- is there is a way to find out the browser version without setting up the browser?
or can we force stop the downloading of the Driver in the first place.
It is possible with the below code but the driver will be downloaded in this case.
WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup(); //without doing this step
WebDriverManager.chromedriver().getDownloadedDriverVersion();
Question 2:-
Currently I am using wmic commands for browser detection which is used in WebDriverManager but it is failing on some systems.
what more alternatives ways are used in the WebDriverManager to fetch the browser version. I am curious to know about this as I've disabled wmic on my system still webDriverManager is working as usual(I guess with alternative methods within WebDriverManager).I am facing difficulties in understand the code. Please help me to understand the flow of the WebDriverManager like which methods/ways are used to detect the browser version and in what order.
Any help would be appreciated!
WebDriverManager
WebDriverManager is the open-source Java library that maintains the configuration management of the drivers required by Selenium WebDriver (e.g., chromedriver, geckodriver, msedgedriver, etc.) in a fully automated fashion.
Additionally, WebDriverManager provides other relevant features, such as the capability to discover browsers installed in the local system, building WebDriver objects (such as ChromeDriver, FirefoxDriver, EdgeDriver, etc.), and running browsers in Docker containers seamlessly.
The primary use of WebDriverManager is the automation of driver management (i.e., download, setup, and maintenance) of the drivers involved in your Test Automation Suite. Hence using WebDriverManager it's highly unlikely you can force stop the downloading of the Driver in the first place.
However, when you use a specific browser version for the first time in a while the matched driver version is downloaded and saved within the cache which is pretty much evident from the generated logs.
====== WebDriver manager ======
Current google-chrome version is 98.0.4758
Get LATEST chromedriver version for 98.0.4758 google-chrome
There is no [win32] chromedriver for browser in cache
Trying to download new driver from https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/98.0.4758.102/chromedriver_win32.zip
Driver has been saved in cache [C:\Users\Sadanand.Kolhe\.wdm\drivers\chromedriver\win32\98.0.4758.102]
Moving forward, if the browser version and the matched driver version remains unchanged and at the same time the previous version of the downloaded version of the driver is available within the cache, the fresh downloading is avoided, which is evident from the logs generated from two back to back test execution.
====== WebDriver manager ======
Current google-chrome version is 98.0.4758
Get LATEST chromedriver version for 98.0.4758 google-chrome
Driver [C:\Users\Sadanand.Kolhe\.wdm\drivers\chromedriver\win32\98.0.4758.102\chromedriver.exe] found in cache
Regarding Q1, as of version 5, WebDriverManager allows detecting if a given browser is installed or not in the local system. To this aim, each manager provides the method getBrowserPath(). This method returns an Optional<Path>, which is empty if a given browser is not installed in the system or the browser path (within the optional object) when detected. See doc.
Regarding Q2, WebDriverManager uses internally a knowledge database called commands database. This database is a collection of shell commands used to discover the version of a given browser in the different operating systems (e.g., google-chrome --version for Chrome in Linux). This database contains WMIC commands for Windows but also queries to the registry. See doc again.
I am using PyCharm to run my robot framework-selenium scripts.
I am facing an issue
SessionNotCreatedException: Message: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 91 Current browser version is 93.0.4577.63 with binary path
Attached are my settings.
How to upgrade chromedriver for Chrome version 93 or any other suggestion. I have 75 automation scripts and it is not feasible to add driver = chrome path in all the scripts.
Browser drivers
The general approach to install a browser driver is downloading a right driver, such as chromedriver for Chrome, and placing it into a directory that is in PATH
Drivers for different browsers can be found via Selenium documentation or by using your favorite search engine with a search term like selenium chrome browser driver. New browser driver versions are released to support features in new browsers, fix bug, or otherwise, and you need to keep an eye on them to know when to update drivers you use.
Alternatively, you can use a tool called WebdriverManagerwhich can find the latest version or when required, any version of appropriate webdrivers for you and then download and link/copy it into right location. Tool can run on all major operating systems and supports downloading of Chrome, Firefox, Opera & Edge webdrivers.
Here's an example:
pip install webdrivermanager
webdrivermanager firefox chrome --linkpath /usr/local/bin
Please go through, here, everything is documented here.
What is the version compatibility between chromedriver and selenium-server-standalone.jar?
In other words, does latest version of chromedriver work with latest version of selenium-server-standalone.jar?
The Chrome Driver itself is tied more to the version of Chrome available on the execution Node (where the browser is actually spawned and a test is ran).
If you refer to the release notes, you'll see how the driver versions map to the various releases of Chrome itself.
The practice I have in place is as follows:
I match my Selenium dependency (C#/Java language bindings) to the version of the selenium-server I run either locally or on my Grid.
When I deploy a version of my test project that upgrades the Selenium dependency, I simply upgrade all my Grid VM's to the matching version (using JSON Node config really helps here, since all I have to do is stop the service, swap the jar, and relaunch with my JSON configs).
Firefox Driver is built into Selenium, so no upgrade management there. IE Driver has (at least historically) matched the minor version number of Selenium (for example, current IE Driver is 2.48.0 while Selenium is at 2.48.2), so I typically upgrade my IE driver whenever I upgrade my Selenium version. The version of Chrome Driver I employ on any given Node will then correspond to whatever version of Chrome that particular Node has installed, though in my own case, this is typically the most recent version.
In short, it's more important to match the version of Chrome Driver to the version of Chrome under which you are testing.
To add my 2 cents, chromedriver acts as the "bridge" between Chrome and the Selenium jar, so on one side you have the protocol and interface (WebDriver) that is backward compatible and on the other you have dependency on browser's releases which isn't. So compatibility wise #tim-slifer's answer is sufficient (except that now Firefox also has a driver).
However, when consuming the selenium-server-standalone.jar, you consume a binary. So versioning wise, keeping up to date with the Selenium releases is simply to have fixes to new issues that rise with time - some of which related to the compatibility between chromedriver and Chrome.
So yes and no, there is some compatibility between the 2, although an old jar and bindings can work just fine with new browsers.
I have small doubt.
Why do we need IEdriver and Chrome Driver running selenium scrits in IE and Chrome but we do not need a firefox driver to run the script?
Is there any reason for the same?
This is because of the Native Browser approach used in WebDriver.
Each and every browser uses different JS Engine.
All drivers [Chrome Driver, IE driver, etc.,] are built based on the special JS Engine used by each browser.
Selenium offers inbuilt driver for Firefox but not for other browsers. [Not sure it may happen in future, since TestNG and JUnit library files are a part of Selenium-standalone-server right now]
Straight from a google search for FirefoxDriver, the official documentation states:
Firefox driver is included in the selenium-server-stanalone.jar available in the downloads. The driver comes in the form of an xpi (firefox extension) which is added to the firefox profile when you start a new instance of FirefoxDriver.
External drivers are the preferred process by the Selenium developers. They allow the driver versioning to be tied more closely to the browser than to Selenium, and they can be supported by the browser authors (e.g., ChromeDriver, OperaDriver). There is a long-standing plan to replace FirefoxDriver with a Mozilla-supported driver based on Mozilla's "Marionette" architecture.
Firefox driver is already included in the selenium-server-standalone.jar package.
I hear that webdriver for Chrome is being re-developed as part of the Chromium project (since the original Chrome webdriver of the selenium project is unusable). Does anyone know if development is complete? If so, where can I find the jars? Has it been pushed to maven central yet?
The new Chrome driver has been checked into the Chromium project tree, and the binaries made available on the Selenium project site. The individual language bindings for the Chrome driver will still be included in the Selenium downloads. Information about what is required to run the new Chrome driver can be found in the project wiki. Note that Chrome 12.0.712.0 or higher is required to work with the new Chrome driver.
The .jars, as of this writing, are not available yet in any Maven repository. You can expect that to change when the next public release of the compiled sources is available. In the interim, you can build from the latest sources yourself.