How to Run Webdriver in chrome browser?

Normally to run webdriver, we just need a browser and a selenium server jar file. Selenium 2 by-default supports Mozilla Firefox browser. Then the next question come to your mind is How to run webdriver in other browsers.

Selenium supports to run webdriver in other browsers by just adding an .exe path of the driver server for the individual browsers.

Now to run selenium webdriver in Chrome browser, we need to take the help of ChromeDriver which is a separate executable that selenium webdriver uses to control chrome. ChromeDriver is supported by the Chromium team, ChromeDriver is a standalone server which implements WebDriver's wire protocol for Chromium.

First of all, download latest version of ChromeDriver server for webdriver. You can download latest version of ChromeDriver server from Download Chrome Server

Note: Choose the chromedriver based on your working environment. If you are working on windows environment, you need to click on "Chromedriver_win32.zip".
Save the downloaded file to your local machine.

In your code you need to set the property for chrome driver, specify its location via the webdriver.chrome.driver as below

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "pathofchromedriver\\chromedriver.exe");

If you dint set the path / or if you give the wrong path, then you will be seeing below error immediately once you start your script
Error: The path to the driver executable must be set by the webdriver.chrome.driver system property

Next, we need to instantiate an instance of ChromeDriver, which will be driving our browser:

driver = webdriver.Chrome();

Let us try to run a simple example to Open Google Chrome using Selenium with Java. To run the below program Right Click -> Run As -> Java Application.

package com.easy;

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

public class ChromeExample {
	
 public static String driverPath = "F:/lib/chromedriver/";
 public static WebDriver driver;
 
	public static void main(String []args) {
		System.out.println("launching chrome browser");
		System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", driverPath+"chromedriver.exe");
		driver = new ChromeDriver();
		driver.navigate().to("http://google.com");
	}
}

Below image shows the class 'ChromeExample.java' and to run as java application.

Selenium Chrome example

In the above program, we have imported two statements which allows us to access classes from selenium webdriver packages. As we are working with chrome browser, we have imported 'org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver'. In the same way, if we want to work with other browsers, we will import statements accordingly like 'import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver' for firefox and 'import org.openqa.selenium.ie.InternetExplorerDriver' for InternetExplorer.

Lets us now execute below example program using TestNG. After writing the below code, execute it to run your test in chrome browser which will first open chrome browser and validate Google Home Page Title using TestNG Assertion..

package com.test;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.AfterClass;
import org.testng.annotations.BeforeClass;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

public class TestChromeBrowser {
	
	static String driverPath = "path to chrome driver";
	public WebDriver driver;
	
	@BeforeClass
	public void setUp() {
		System.out.println("*******************");
		System.out.println("launching chrome browser");
		System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", driverPath+"chromedriver.exe");
		driver = new ChromeDriver();
		driver.manage().window().maximize();
	}
	
	@Test
	public void testGooglePageTitleInIEBrowser() {
		driver.navigate().to("http://www.google.com");
		String strPageTitle = driver.getTitle();
		System.out.println("Page title: - "+strPageTitle);
		Assert.assertTrue(strPageTitle.equalsIgnoreCase("Google"), "Page title doesn't match");
	}

	@AfterClass
	public void tearDown() {
		if(driver!=null) {
			System.out.println("Closing chrome browser");
			driver.quit();
		}
	}
	
}

When working with chrome driver, you may face few issues like Element is Not Clickable because of many reasons and there are many work arounds to solve the problem. You can check all the work arounds for 'Element is not clickable' error

As many of them keep asking about a message which displays when your start execution with chrome driver like "starting chromedriver on port xxxxx only local connections are allowed"

This message is just for an information only. It is telling you is that "chromedriver" executable will only accept connections from the local machine.

As most driver implementations ( let it be Chrome driver / IE driver ) creates an HTTP server, and the language bindings (Java / Python / . etc.) use a JsonWireProtocol to communicate with the driver, and automate the browser.

Naturally, since the HTTP server is simply listening on an open port for HTTP requests generated by the language bindings, connections to the HTTP server started by the language bindings are restricted to only be allowed to come from other processes on the same host.
You can check the Stack Overflow for more details on this.

Selenium Tutorials: 

Comments

Hie ,

I have written the same code in selenium web driver.It opens chrome but not opening the webpage. Please guide me.
Regards

HI To open Webpage Use
Driver .Navigate ()to and give URL

Hi, I have done everything as you've discussed, but my Chrome opens and closes automatically after about 1 sec. Please advise.
Thanks.

it is working .. really awesome explanation

Earlier it was not working. only Browser was getting opened not the webpage...
But now everything working..
Thanks!!!

hi,
i am getting below error when running the script
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: unknown error: Chrome version must be >= 43.0.2357.0

HI To open web page use Navigate to. and URl name

What is the reason that without .exe file we can launch firefox browser over other browser ? And why .exe file for other browsers.?

Webdriver offers inbuilt support for Firefox which is included in selenium-server-standalone.jar, but not for other browsers like IE, Chrome etc.

InternetExplorerDriver and ChromeDriver are standalone servers which implements WebDriver’s wire protocol. All implementations of WebDriver that communicate with the browser shall use a common wire protocol. This wire protocol defines a RESTful web service using JSON over HTTP.

hi, anybody know about this error

Starting ChromeDriver 2.20.353145 (343b531d31eeb933ec778dbcf7081628a1396067) on port 16006
Only local connections are allowed.

how to fix it?

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