How to autoupdate Chrome-driver in Selenium?

Question

Every now and then when the Chrome is updated, the existing chrome driver used in the script becomes invalid and the below error message is displayed:

selenium.common.exceptions.SessionNotCreatedException: Message: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 77

I have to manually update the chrome-driver in the written script. Is there any way to update it automatically with the updated chrome version?

Answer 1

Welcome.

Yes, it can be done. You need to follow these steps: https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads/version-selection And you need to choose a tool in which you implement them.

Let's have a look at a few lines in Python, I'll outline the main flow and you might want to build it more powerful (like command line parameters etc.)

First I'll import requests:

import requests

Then I'll save the necessary links into two varibles + I define the file name of the desired version of chrome driver:

url = 'https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/LATEST_RELEASE_'
url_file = 'https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/'
file_name = 'chromedriver_linux64.zip'

Now I'll let the user choose a version, and I get the version from the site:

version = input()
version_response = requests.get(url + version)

Finally, it's time to download the zip file (if it exists):

if version_response.text:
    file = requests.get(url_file + version_response.text + '/' + file_name)
    with open(file_name, "wb") as code:
        code.write(file.content)

The result of these steps will be a zip file with a chrome driver in the current directory (from where you ran the script). You also might use zipfile library to extract the zip file after a successful download.

If you want to fully automate this, you probably need to built in command line parameters and pipe chrome version into your Python script. E.g. in Arch-like systems, you might use $ pacman -Qs chromium for getting Chromium version. Since you don't mention a system architecture on which you want to build this, I've chosen mine.

When ready, you can let it run with cron or similar.

Answer 2

Try using webdriver-manager from npm:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/webdriver-manager

And call webdriver-manager update using batch file from your java, python or what ever tool .

To create batch file , open a text file and add webdriver-manager update as the content and now save it as file.bat

Answer 3

Use WebdriverManage. It downloads the required Driver binary file (if not present locally) into Cache (default location ~/.m2/repository/webdriver)

And this is how you can add it in your code:

WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup();
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

latest version dependency :

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/io.github.bonigarcia/webdrivermanager -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>io.github.bonigarcia</groupId>
    <artifactId>webdrivermanager</artifactId>
    <version>3.7.1</version>
</dependency>

Answer 4

A solution that works for ANY programming language you want to automate with. This way, your team can automate using any Selenium tool.

Using Docker, you can run your own WebDriverManager server, then all you need to do is write really simple code to download drivers from that:

# Mac OSX command
docker run -p 4041:4041 -v $HOME/wdm:/root/.m2/repository bonigarcia/webdrivermanager:4.0.0

# Windows command
docker run -p 4041:4041 -v %USERPROFILE%/wdm:/root/.m2/repository bonigarcia/webdrivermanager:4.0.0

The drivers will be stored in your local $HOME/wdm folder and also inside the docker image. In Docker, set it to remain daemonized with auto-restart policy. It would be very very cheap to host this service on AWS or Azure as it only requires the most minimal hardware to run it.

Here is what it looks like querying the service (using Insomnia rest client):

> GET /firefoxdriver?os=LINUX HTTP/1.1
> Host: localhost:4041
> User-Agent: insomnia/7.1.1
> Accept: */*

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Sat, 04 Jul 2020 17:56:07 GMT
< Server: Javalin
< Content-Type: text/plain
< Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="geckodriver"
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked


* Received 15.8 KB chunk
* Received 15.6 KB chunk
  ....

NOTE: I really like this solution, but when it comes down to it, I probably prefer to automate with Aerokube dockerized browser containers, such as with "Moon framework", which only costs $5/thread/month for a selenium grid that runs dockerized browser tests.