WebDriverManager: New Way to handle driver binaries in Selenium

What is WebDriverManager?

WebDriverManager is an open-source library which is used to automate the handling of browser driver binaries. User can add this library in their selenium project using a build tool like Maven or Gradle depending on your project.

So let’s talk about the advantages or the task which WebDriverManager handles.

• Checks the version of browser installed on your machine.
• Download the driver binary if needed as per the current version of browser to run your selenium script in browser.
• It matches the version of binary and browser and if it doesn’t work anyway then it takes recent browser driver binary (chromedriver.exe or geckodriver.exe)
• It removes the dependency on driver binary on local,

Why we are using this WebDriverManager?

To run selenium script in the browser we need to download driver binary from the official site of Browser. This could be ‘chromedriver.exe’ for Chrome and ‘geckodriver.exe’ and similarly, we have many of the driver binary which needs to be downloaded to run the script in any of the browsers.
But we are not stopping here and our problem is not resolved. But we need to add two lines of code
1- System path for Driver like this. For Chrome Browser we need to put this line of code. Read More

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "/path/to/chromedriver");//we are writing chromedriver without extension, because as per operating system extension may change

For Firefox we need to add this line.

System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "/path/to/geckodriver");

For all other browser, it could be something like this

System.setProperty("webdriver.edge.driver", "/path/to/msedgedriver.exe"); //Edge Browser
System.setProperty("webdriver.opera.driver", "/path/to/operadriver"); //For Opera
System.setProperty("phantomjs.binary.path", "/path/to/phantomjs");  //For PhantomJs
System.setProperty("webdriver.ie.driver", "C:/path/to/IEDriverServer.exe"); // For IE

2- Initializing the browser instance. Which looks like this

WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(); // For Chrome

But we are not sure that next morning this script is going to work on Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Other Browser or not if browse version is updated.
But why this is going to happen. This is always going to happen due to the mismatch of driver binary and the browser version. Then we could be a possible way to move ahead.
So the answer will be download and set the system path and run the script, Might be it will work.

This is the reason, Boni Garcia came up with this WebDriverManager library which automates this complete process of downloading binary and matching it with the version of the browser.

How to add WebDriverManager Dependency In Selenium Project?

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.github.bonigarcia</groupId>
    <artifactId>webdrivermanager</artifactId>
    <version>4.2.2</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

dependencies {
    testImplementation("io.github.bonigarcia:webdrivermanager:4.2.2")
}

package webdriverExample;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

import io.github.bonigarcia.wdm.WebDriverManager;

public class WebDriverManagerExample {

   public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {

    WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup();

    WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

    driver.get("https://abodeqa.com");

    Thread.sleep(5000);

    driver.quit();
}
}

package webdriverExample;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

import io.github.bonigarcia.wdm.WebDriverManager;
import io.github.bonigarcia.wdm.config.DriverManagerType;

public class WebDriverManagerExample {


    public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {

    Class<ChromeDriver> driverclass = ChromeDriver.class;

    WebDriverManager.getInstance(driverclass).setup();

    WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

    driver.get("https://abodeqa.com");

    Thread.sleep(5000);

    driver.quit();
}
}

Class<ChromeDriver> driverclass = ChromeDriver.class;

WebDriverManager.getInstance(driverclass).setup();

What if we want to keep specific version of driver binary or browser version?

This library has provided a way to use a specific version of the driver as well as browser

So let’s say you want to run some older version of chromedriver or any other browser driver, in that case, you need to write the code like this

WebDriverManager.chromedriver().driverVersion(“86.0.4240.22”).setup();
So in place of version 86.0.4240.22, you can put any of the version of chromedriver version which you can see on this URL
https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads
Similarly, in place of using driver version, we can use browser version to select any specific version of the browser, So code will look like this
WebDriverManager.chromedriver().browserVersion(“87.0.4280”).setup();

So if you want to learn something more about WebDriverManager in that I would suggest you, use this link and read this in detail.

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