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>