Webdrivers

Run Selenium tests more easily with automatic installation and updates for all supported webdrivers.

Description

webdrivers downloads drivers and directs Selenium to use them. Currently supports:

• chromedriver
• geckodriver
• IEDriverServer
• msedgedriver

Works on macOS, Linux, Windows, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) v1 and v2. And do see the browser and OS specific notes at the bottom.

Usage

In your Gemfile:

gem 'webdrivers', '~> 5.0', require: false

In your project:

require 'webdrivers'

The drivers will now be automatically downloaded or updated when you launch a browser through Selenium.

Specific Drivers

If you want webdrivers to only manage specific drivers you can specify one or more as follows:

require 'webdrivers/chromedriver'
require 'webdrivers/geckodriver'
require 'webdrivers/iedriver'
require 'webdrivers/edgedriver'

Download Location

The default download location is ~/.webdrivers directory, and this is configurable:

Webdrivers.install_dir = '/webdrivers/install/dir'

Alternatively, you can define the path via the WD_INSTALL_DIR environment variable.

Version Pinning

If you would like to use a specific (older or beta) version, you can specify it for each driver. Otherwise, the latest (stable) driver will be downloaded and passed to Selenium.

# Chrome
Webdrivers::Chromedriver.required_version = '2.46'

# Firefox
Webdrivers::Geckodriver.required_version  = '0.23.0'

# Internet Explorer
Webdrivers::IEdriver.required_version     = '3.14.0'

# Edge (Chromium)
Webdrivers::Edgedriver.required_version   = '76.0.183.0'

You can explicitly trigger the update in your code, but this will happen automatically when the driver is initialized:

Webdrivers::Chromedriver.update

Caching Drivers

You can set Webdrivers to only look for updates if the previous check was longer ago than a specified number of seconds.

Webdrivers.cache_time = 86_400 # Default: 86,400 Seconds (24 hours)

Alternatively, you can define this value via the WD_CACHE_TIME environment variable. Only set one to avoid confusion.

Special exception for chromedriver and msedgedriver

Cache time will be respected as long as a driver binary exists and the major.minor.build versions of the browser and the driver match. For example, if you update Chrome or Edge to v76.0.123 and its driver is still at v76.0.100, webdrivers will ignore the cache time and update the driver to make sure you're using a compatible build version.

Proxy

If there is a proxy between you and the Internet then you will need to configure the gem to use the proxy. You can do this by calling the configure method.

Webdrivers.configure do |config|
  config.proxy_addr = 'myproxy_address.com'
  config.proxy_port = '8080'
  config.proxy_user = 'username'
  config.proxy_pass = 'password'
end

SSL_connect errors

If you are getting an error like this (especially common on Windows):

SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3 read server certificate B: certificate verify failed

Add the following to your Gemfile:

gem "net_http_ssl_fix"

Add the following to your code:

require 'net_http_ssl_fix'

Other solutions are documented on the RubyGems website.

Rake tasks

Each driver has its own set of rake tasks (with Railtie support) that you can call once before executing the tests. These are especially useful if you're running tests in parallel and want to avoid performing an update check per thread.

If you are using Rails default configuration the webdrivers gem will only be loaded in the test group so you will need to specify the test environment when using the tasks:

RAILS_ENV=test rails webdrivers:chromedriver:update

If you are not using Rails, you'll need to load them into your Rakefile like this:

require 'webdrivers'
load 'webdrivers/Rakefile'

The full list of available tasks is:

$ bundle exec rake -T
rake webdrivers:chromedriver:remove           # Force remove chromedriver
rake webdrivers:chromedriver:update[version]  # Remove and download updated chromedriver if necessary
rake webdrivers:chromedriver:version          # Print current chromedriver version
rake webdrivers:edgedriver:remove             # Force remove msedgedriver
rake webdrivers:edgedriver:update[version]    # Remove and download updated msedgedriver if necessary
rake webdrivers:edgedriver:version            # Print current msedgedriver version
rake webdrivers:geckodriver:remove            # Force remove geckodriver
rake webdrivers:geckodriver:update[version]   # Remove and download updated geckodriver if necessary
rake webdrivers:geckodriver:version           # Print current geckodriver version
rake webdrivers:iedriver:remove               # Force remove IEDriverServer
rake webdrivers:iedriver:update[version]      # Remove and download updated IEDriverServer if necessary
rake webdrivers:iedriver:version              # Print current IEDriverServer version

These tasks respect the WD_INSTALL_DIR, WD_CACHE_TIME, WD_CHROME_PATH, and WD_EDGE_CHROME_PATH environment variables, which can also be passed through the rake command:

$ bundle exec rake webdrivers:chromedriver:update[2.46] webdrivers:geckodriver:update[0.24.0] WD_CACHE_TIME=86_400 WD_INSTALL_DIR='my_dir'
2019-05-20 19:03:01 INFO Webdrivers Updated to chromedriver 2.46.628388
2019-05-20 19:03:04 INFO Webdrivers Updated to geckodriver 0.24.0

Please note that these tasks do not use any of the configurations from your project (code) and only respect the ENV variables and the version (optional) passed to the rake tasks.

Logging

The logging level can be configured for debugging purpose:

Webdrivers.logger.level = :DEBUG

Browser & OS Specific Notes

Chrome/Chromium

The version of chromedriver will depend on the version of Chrome you are using it with:

• For versions >= 70, the downloaded version of chromedriver will match the installed version of Google Chrome. More information here.
• For versions <= 69, chromedriver version 2.41 will be downloaded.
• For beta versions, you'll have to require the beta version of chromedriver using Webdrivers::Chromedriver.required_version.

The gem looks for the Chrome/Chromium version that chromedriver will use by default. You can override this behavior by providing a path to the browser binary you want to use:

Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome.path = '/chromium/install/path/to/binary'

Alternatively, you can define the path via the WD_CHROME_PATH environment variable.

This is also required if Google Chrome is not installed in its default location.

Chrome on Heroku

Follow the specific instructions here if you're using heroku-buildpack-google-chrome.

Microsoft Edge (Chromium)

Microsoft Edge (Chromium) support was added in v4.1.0. Notes from the Chrome/Chromium section apply to this browser as well.

Please note that msedgedriver requires selenium-webdriver v4.

WSLv1 support

While WSLv1 is not designed to run headful applications like Chrome, it can run exes; as such when found to be running in WSL, webdrivers will use Chrome on the Windows filesystem.

It's recommended that you install the new PowerShell (PS7) to avoid a known issue with the console font being changed when calling the old PowerShell (PS5).

WSLv2 support

Webdrivers will detect WSLv2 as running on Linux and use Chrome on the Linux filesystem.

WSLv2 doesn't support connecting to host ports out of the box, so it isn't possible to connect to Chromedriver on Windows without extra configurations, see: microsoft/WSL#4619. The simplest way to use Chromedriver with WSLv2 is to run Chrome headless on Linux.

Chrome and Edge on Apple M1 (arm64)

If you're switching from Intel to M1, you'll have to manually delete the existing Intel (mac64) driver before the M1 (arm64) build can be downloaded. Otherwise, you'll get an error: Bad CPU type in executable - ~/.webdrivers/chromedriver (Errno::E086)

Wiki

Please see the wiki for solutions to commonly reported issues.

Join us in the #webdrivers-gem channel on Slack if you have any questions.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License, see LICENSE.txt for full details and copyright.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub. Run bundle exec rake and squash the commits in your PRs.