These drivers are reused in subsequent calls.įinally, WebDriverManager exports the driver path using Java system properties (e.g., in the case of the Chrome manager). Once the driver version is discovered, WebDriverManager downloads this driver to a local cache (located at ~/.cache/selenium by default).

This database maps the browser releases with the known compatible driver versions. For this reason, WebDriverManager uses another knowledge database called versions database. Unfortunately, this information is not available in other browsers (e.g., Firefox and Opera) or older versions of Chrome and Firefox. For instance, to find out the version of chromedriver required for Chrome 89, we need to read the following file. In Chrome and Edge, their respective drivers (chromedriver and msedgedriver) maintainers also publish resources to identify the suitable driver version for a given major browser release.

This process is different for each browser. Using the browser version, WebDriverManager tries to find the proper driver version. 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). To this aim, WebDriverManager uses internally a knowledge database called commands database. WebDriverManager tries to find the browser version. Each driver path should be identified using a given system property, as follows: Second, we can use Java system properties to export the driver path. First, we can add the driver location to our PATH environmental variable. In Java, this setup can be done in two different ways.

Once we have downloaded the driver to our computer, we need to provide a way to locate this driver from our Selenium WebDriver tests. For this reason, we need to discover the correct driver version for a specific browser release (typically reading the driver documentation or release notes). Concerning the version, each driver release is usually compatible with a given browser version(s). To download the proper driver, we have to identify the driver type we need (e.g., chromedriver if we want to use Chrome), the operating system (typically, Windows, Linux, or Mac OS), the architecture (typically, 32 or 64 bits), and very important, the driver version. Drivers are platform-specific binary files.

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