ChromeDriver

An NPM wrapper for Selenium ChromeDriver.

Building and Installing

npm install chromedriver

Or grab the source and

node ./install.js

What this is really doing is just grabbing a particular "blessed" (by this module) version of ChromeDriver. As new versions are released and vetted, this module will be updated accordingly.

The package has been set up to fetch and run ChromeDriver for MacOS (darwin), Linux based platforms (as identified by Node.js), and Windows. If you spot any platform weirdness, let us know or send a patch.

Configuration Methods

You can configure chromedriver using any of the following methods. The installer will check all of these, in order of precedence:

• Environment variables in uppercase (e.g., CHROMEDRIVER_VERSION)
• package.json#config in lowercase
• .npmrc entries in lowercase (e.g., chromedriver_version=LATEST)

This applies to all options such as:

• chromedriver_version
• chromedriver_cdnurl
• chromedriver_cdnbinariesurl
• chromedriver_legacy_cdnurl
• chromedriver_skip_download
• chromedriver_force_download
• chromedriver_filepath
• detect_chromedriver_version
• include_chromium

But not to native npm config options, which can be set as per NPM's documentation.

For example, to set the version, you can use:

CHROMEDRIVER_VERSION=LATEST npm install chromedriver

Or in your package.json under config:

{
  // ... other configuration
  "config": {
    "chromedriver_version": "LATEST"
  }
}

You can also add it to your .npmrc when using NPM up to version 11, but the NPM team is discouraging it and it won't work on version 12+:

chromedriver_version=LATEST

The same goes to using arguments, it will work up to version 11:

npm install chromedriver --chromedriver_version=LATEST

These last two way to configure the installation will be removed from this package a few months after the NPM team removes support for them.

Force download

By default this package, when installed, will search for an existing Chromedriver binary in your configured temp directory. If found, and it is the correct version, it will simply copy it to your node_modules directory. You can force it to always download by configuring it in your package.json under config:

{
  "config": {
    "chromedriver_force_download": "true"
  }
}

Another option is to use PATH variable CHROMEDRIVER_FORCE_DOWNLOAD.

CHROMEDRIVER_FORCE_DOWNLOAD=true npm install chromedriver

Custom binaries url

This allows you to use your own endpoints for metadata and binaries. It is useful in air gapped scenarios or if you have download restrictions, such as firewalls.

This was changed for version 115 and greater (see details), but implemented in this package starting with version 114.0.2. To see the configuration to prior versions check out this README.md at the latest tag where it was using the legacy urls (114.0.1).

There are two urls that need to be configured, one for metadata and one for binaries. The one for metadata is the "CDN url", and the one for binaries is the "CDN binaries url". See Chrome for Testing to understand how these urls work.

Config

For metadata use chromedriver_cdnurl. The default is https://googlechromelabs.github.io. You need to either supply the binary download endpoint, or the binaries url config, see below.

For binaries use chromedriver_cdnbinariesurl. The default is to search for the download url using $chromedriver_cdnurl/chrome-for-testing/[version].json, which forms a URL like: https://googlechromelabs.github.io/chrome-for-testing/122.0.6261.57.json.

The resulting url will be something like: https://storage.googleapis.com/chrome-for-testing-public/122.0.6261.57/linux64/chromedriver-linux64.zip.

Keep in mind that this last url is just an example and it might change (as it has happened in the past).

One option is to use the environment variables CHROMEDRIVER_CDNURL and CHROMEDRIVER_CDNBINARIESURL.

CHROMEDRIVER_CDNURL=https://npmmirror.com/metadata CHROMEDRIVER_CDNBINARIESURL=https://npmmirror.com/binaries npm install chromedriver

Or add them to your package.json:

{
  "config": {
    "chromedriver_cdnurl": "https://npmmirror.com/metadata",
    "chromedriver_cdnbinariesurl": "https://npmmirror.com/binaries"
  }
}

Or use the legacy arguments:

npm install chromedriver --chromedriver_cdnurl=https://npmmirror.com/metadata --chromedriver_cdnbinariesurl=https://npmmirror.com/binaries

Or add these properties to your .npmrc file:

chromedriver_cdnurl=https://npmmirror.com/metadata
chromedriver_cdnbinariesurl=https://npmmirror.com/binaries

Custom binaries file

To get the chromedriver from the filesystem instead of a web request use the npm config property chromedriver_filepath in your package.json under config:

{
  "config": {
    "chromedriver_filepath": "/path/to/chromedriver_mac64.zip"
  }
}

Or using the environment variable:

CHROMEDRIVER_FILEPATH=/path/to/chromedriver_mac64.zip npm install chromedriver

Or the legacy methods:

npm install chromedriver --chromedriver_filepath=/path/to/chromedriver_mac64.zip

Or add property to your .npmrc file.

chromedriver_filepath=/path/to/chromedriver_mac64.zip

This variable can be used to set either a .zip file or the binary itself, eg:

CHROMEDRIVER_FILEPATH=/bin/chromedriver

Installing on RISC-V 64-bit Systems

Chromedriver does not provide an official binary for RISC-V 64-bit architectures. To install on a RISC-V system, you must supply your own Chromedriver binary using the --chromedriver_filepath option. For example:

npm install chromedriver --chromedriver_filepath=/path/to/chromedriver

Custom download options

Install through a proxy.

npm config set proxy http://[user:pwd]@domain.tld:port
npm config set https-proxy http://[user:pwd]@domain.tld:port

Use different User-Agent.

npm config set user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0"

Skipping chromedriver download

You may wish to skip the downloading of the chromedriver binary file, for example if you know for certain that it is already there or if you want to use a system binary and just use this module as an interface to interact with it.

To achieve this you can use the config property chromedriver_skip_download, either via environment variable:

CHROMEDRIVER_SKIP_DOWNLOAD=true npm install chromedriver

Or in your package.json under config:

{
  "config": {
    "chromedriver_skip_download": "true"
  }
}

Or using the legacy method, via argument:

npm install chromedriver --chromedriver_skip_download=true

Or adding a property to your .npmrc file.

chromedriver_skip_download=true

Versioning

The NPM package version tracks the version of chromedriver that will be installed, with an additional build number that is used for revisions to the installer. You can use the package version number to install a specific version, or use the setting to a specific version. If there is a new Chromedriver version available which is not yet available as a version of node-chromedriver, the npm command npm run update-chromedriver in this repository can be used to make the required updates to this module, please submit the change as a PR. To always install the latest version of Chromedriver, use LATEST as the version number. In your package.json under config:

{
  "config": {
    "chromedriver_version": "LATEST"
  }
}

Using the environment variable:

CHROMEDRIVER_VERSION=LATEST npm install chromedriver

Or using the legacy method:

npm install chromedriver --chromedriver_version=LATEST

Or adding the property to your .npmrc file.

chromedriver_version=LATEST

Another option is to use env variable CHROMEDRIVER_VERSION.

CHROMEDRIVER_VERSION=LATEST npm install chromedriver

You can force the latest release for a specific major version by specifying LATEST_{VERSION_NUMBER}:

CHROMEDRIVER_VERSION=LATEST_80 npm install chromedriver

You can also force a different version of chromedriver by replacing LATEST with a version number:

CHROMEDRIVER_VERSION=75.0.3770.140 npm install chromedriver

Detect ChromeDriver Version

The NPM package version may not be always compatible to your Chrome version. To get the chromedriver that corresponds to the version of Chrome installed, you can use the npm config property detect_chromedriver_version. In your package.json under config:

{
  "config": {
    "detect_chromedriver_version": "true"
  }
}

Or using the environment variable:

DETECT_CHROMEDRIVER_VERSION=true npm install chromedriver

Or the legacy method with the argument:

npm install chromedriver --detect_chromedriver_version=true

Or add property to your .npmrc file.

detect_chromedriver_version=true

Note: When the property detect_chromedriver_version is provided, chromedriver_version and chromedriver_filepath properties are ignored.

Include Chromium

If you don't have Chrome installed, you can check for Chromium version instead by setting the argument include_chromium to true. In your package.json under config:

{
  "config": {
    "include_chromium": "true"
  }
}

Or using the environment variable:

INCLUDE_CHROMIUM=true npm install chromedriver

Or using the legacy argument:

npm install chromedriver --include_chromium=true

Or add property to your .npmrc file.

include_chromium=true

Note: The property INCLUDE_CHROMIUM is ignored if the property DETECT_CHROMEDRIVER_VERSION is not used.

Running

bin/chromedriver [arguments]

And npm will install a link to the binary in node_modules/.bin as it is wont to do.

Running with Selenium WebDriver

require('chromedriver');
var webdriver = require('selenium-webdriver');
var driver = new webdriver.Builder()
  .forBrowser('chrome')
  .build();

(Tested for selenium-webdriver version 2.48.2)

The path will be added to the process automatically, you don't need to configure it. But you can get it from require('chromedriver').path if you want it.

Running via node

The package exports a path string that contains the path to the chromedriver binary/executable.

Below is an example of using this package via node.

var childProcess = require('child_process');
var chromedriver = require('chromedriver');
var binPath = chromedriver.path;

var childArgs = [
  'some argument'
];

childProcess.execFile(binPath, childArgs, function(err, stdout, stderr) {
  // handle results
});

You can also use the start and stop methods:

var chromedriver = require('chromedriver');

args = [
 // optional arguments
];
chromedriver.start(args);
// run your tests
chromedriver.stop();

With the latest version, you can optionally receive a Promise from the chromedriver.start function:

var returnPromise = true;
chromedriver
  .start(args, returnPromise)
  .then(() => {
    console.log('chromedriver is ready');
  });

Note: if your tests are ran asynchronously, chromedriver.stop() will have to be executed as a callback at the end of your tests

A Note on chromedriver

Chromedriver is not a library for NodeJS.

This is an NPM wrapper and can be used to conveniently make ChromeDriver available. It is not a Node.js wrapper.

Supported Node.js versions

We will do our best to support every supported Node.js versions. See nodejs/Release for the current supported versions. You can also view our build scripts and check the versions there.

Contributing

Questions, comments, bug reports, and pull requests are all welcome. Submit them at the project on GitHub.

Bug reports that include steps-to-reproduce (including code) are the best. Even better, make them in the form of pull requests.

We have added VS Code Remote support with containers. If you are on Windows, set git config core.autocrlf input so you don't get git errors.

Author

Giovanni Bassi, with collaboration from lots of good people.

Thanks for the PhantomJS install project for heavy inspiration!

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.