Things I Wish I Knew About ChromeWebDriver Last Week

I’ve recently had the opportunity to start a Specflow/Selenium end to end testing project from scratch and my gosh it’s been fun. I’m one of those people that absolutely love unit tests and trying to “trick” the code with complicated scenarios. End to end testing with Selenium is like that but on steroids. Seeing the browser flash infront of you and motor through tests is an amazing feeling.

But in saying that. A key part of using Selenium is the “ChromeWebDriver”. It’s the tool that actually allows you to manipulate the Google Chrome browser through selenium. And let me tell you, there are a few headaches getting this set up that I really didn’t expect. Version errors, Not finding the right exe, Nuget packages that actually include the exe but it’s the wrong version or can’t be found. Ugh.

If you are not that big into automation testing, you can probably skip this whole post. But if you use Specflow/Selenium even semi-regularly, I highly recommend bookmarking this post because I’m 99% sure you will hit atleast one of these bugs when setting up a new testing project.

Chrome, Gecko  and IE Drivers

While the below is mostly about using ChromeDriver, some of this is also applicable for Gecko (Firefox), and IE drivers. Obviously the error messages will be slightly different, but it’s also highly likely you will run into very similar issues.

Adding ChromeDriver.exe To Your Project

The first thing to note is that you’ve probably added the “Selenium.WebDriver” and maybe “Specflow” nuget packages. These however *do not* contain the actual ChromeDriver executable. They only contain the C# code required to interact with the driver, but *not* the driver itself. It is incredibly confusing at first but kinda makes sense because you may want to only use Chrome or only Firefox or a combination etc. So it’s left up to you to actually add the required driver EXEs.

If you try and run your selenium tests without it, it will actually compile all fine and look like starting only to bomb out with :

The chromedriver.exe file does not exist in the current directory or in a directory on the PATH environment variable.

Depending on your setup, it can also bomb out with :

The file C:\path\to\my\project\chromedriver.exe does not exist. 
The driver can be downloaded at http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html

So there are two ways to add ChromeDriver to your project. The first is that you can install a nuget package that will write it to your bin folder when building. The most common nuget package that does this is here : https://www.nuget.org/packages/Selenium.WebDriver.ChromeDriver/

But a quick note, as we will see below, this only works if everywhere you run the tests has the correct version of chrome that matches the driver. What?! You didn’t know that? That’s right. The version of ChromeDriver.exe will have a version like 79.0.1.1 that will typically only be able to run on machines that have chrome version 79 installed. The nuget package itself is typically marked with the version of Chrome you need, so it’s easy to figure out, but can still be a big pain in the butt to get going.

So with that in mind, the other option is to actually download the driver yourself from the chromium downloads page : https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads

You need to then drop the exe into your project. And make sure it’s set to copy if newer for your build. Then when building, it should show up in your bin folder. Personally, I found the manual download of the chromium driver to be handy when working in an enterprise environment where the version of chrome might be locked down by some group policy, or you are working with others who may have wildly different versions of chrome and you can do funky things like have different versions for different developers.

Passing The ChromeDriver Location

So you’ve downloaded ChromeDriver and when you build, you can see it in your bin folder, but everything is still blowing up with the same error, what gives?!

One of the more irritating things I found is that in so many tutorials, they new’d up a chromedriver instance like so :

ChromeDriver = new ChromeDriver();

Now this may have worked in .NET Framework (I haven’t tried), but atleast for me in .NET Core, this never works. I think there must be something inside the constructor of ChromeDriver that looks up where it’s current executable is running (e.g. where the Bin folder is), and in .NET Core this must be different from Full Framework.

In anycase, you can change the constructor to instead take the folder location where it can find the driver. In my case I want that to be the bin folder :

ChromeDriver = new ChromeDriver(Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location));

Obviously you can go ahead and change the path to anything which is super handy for differing dev setups. For example you could ask each dev to maintain their own version of chromedriver.exe somewhere on their C:\ drive, and then just pass that location into the constructor. Meaning that each developer can have a completely different version of chrome, and things will still run perfectly fine.

Versions Matter

We kinda touched on it above, but versions of ChromeDriver have to match the actual version of Chrome on the machine. If you are getting errors like so :

session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version XX

Then you have a mismatch between versions.

The easiest way to rectify the issue is to manually download the correct version of ChromeDriver from here : https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads and force your code to use it. If you are using a nuget package for the driver, then it’s highly likely you would need to switch away from it to a manual setup to give you better control over versioning.

Azure Devops (And Others) Have ChromeDriver Environment Variables

This is one that I really wish I knew about sooner. When I tried to run my Selenium tests on Azure Devops, I was getting version issues where the version of Chrome on my hosted build agent was just slightly different from the one on my machine. I tried to do all sorts of crazy things by swapping our the exe version etc, but then I found buried in a help doc that there is actually an environment variable named ChromeWebDriver that has the full path to a chromedriver that is guaranteed to match that of the chrome browser on the agent. So I wrote some quick code that if I was running inside Azure Devops, to grab that environment variable and pass that into my ChromeDriver constructor.

Again, this is only for Azure Devops. But if you are using Gitlab, Bamboo, TeamCity, whatever! Check to see if there is an environment variable on hosted agents that carries the location of ChromeDriver.

If you are using your own build agents, then it’s also a good idea to think about following the same pattern. It’s super handy to have the Build Agent look after it’s own versions rather than wrangling something in code to fudge it all.