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selenium-webdriver
Advanced tools
Selenium is a browser automation library. Most often used for testing web-applications, Selenium may be used for any task that requires automating interaction with the browser.
Selenium supports Node 0.12.x and 4.x. Users on Node 0.12.x must run with
the --harmony flag. Selenium may be installed via npm with
npm install selenium-webdriver
Out of the box, Selenium includes everything you need to work with Firefox. You will need to download additional components to work with the other major browsers. The drivers for Chrome, IE, PhantomJS, and Opera are all standalone executables that should be placed on your PATH. The SafariDriver browser extension should be installed in your browser before using Selenium; we recommend disabling the extension when using the browser without Selenium or installing the extension in a profile only used for testing.
| Browser | Component |
|---|---|
| Chrome | chromedriver(.exe) |
| Internet Explorer | IEDriverServer.exe |
| PhantomJS | phantomjs(.exe) |
| Opera | operadriver(.exe) |
| Safari | SafariDriver.safariextz |
The sample below and others are included in the example directory. You may
also find the tests for selenium-webdriver informative.
var webdriver = require('selenium-webdriver'),
By = require('selenium-webdriver').By,
until = require('selenium-webdriver').until;
var driver = new webdriver.Builder()
.forBrowser('firefox')
.build();
driver.get('http://www.google.com/ncr');
driver.findElement(By.name('q')).sendKeys('webdriver');
driver.findElement(By.name('btnG')).click();
driver.wait(until.titleIs('webdriver - Google Search'), 1000);
driver.quit();
The Builder class is your one-stop shop for configuring new WebDriver
instances. Rather than clutter your code with branches for the various browsers,
the builder lets you set all options in one flow. When you call
Builder#build(), all options irrelevant to the selected browser are dropped:
var webdriver = require('selenium-webdriver'),
chrome = require('selenium-webdriver/chrome'),
firefox = require('selenium-webdriver/firefox');
var driver = new webdriver.Builder()
.forBrowser('firefox')
.setChromeOptions(/* ... */)
.setFirefoxOptions(/* ... */)
.build();
Why would you want to configure options irrelevant to the target browser? The
Builder's API defines your default configuration. You can change the target
browser at runtime through the SELENIUM_BROWSER environment variable. For
example, the example/google_search.js script is configured to run against
Firefox. You can run the example against other browsers just by changing the
runtime environment
# cd node_modules/selenium-webdriver
node example/google_search
SELENIUM_BROWSER=chrome node example/google_search
SELENIUM_BROWSER=safari node example/google_search
The standalone Selenium Server acts as a proxy between your script and the browser-specific drivers. The server may be used when running locally, but it's not recommend as it introduces an extra hop for each request and will slow things down. The server is required, however, to use a browser on a remote host (most browser drivers, like the IEDriverServer, do not accept remote connections).
To use the Selenium Server, you will need to install the JDK and download the latest server from Selenium. Once downloaded, run the server with
java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.45.0.jar
You may configure your tests to run against a remote server through the Builder API:
var driver = new webdriver.Builder()
.forBrowser('firefox')
.usingServer('http://localhost:4444/wd/hub')
.build();
Or change the Builder's configuration at runtime with the SELENIUM_REMOTE_URL
environment variable:
SELENIUM_REMOTE_URL="http://localhost:4444/wd/hub" node script.js
You can experiment with these options using the example/google_search.js
script provided with selenium-webdriver.
API documentation is included in the docs directory and is also available
online from the Selenium project. Addition resources include
Contributions are accepted either through GitHub pull requests or patches via the Selenium issue tracker. You must sign our Contributor License Agreement before your changes will be accepted.
Please report any issues using the Selenium issue tracker. When using the issue tracker
Licensed to the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The SFC licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It is similar to selenium-webdriver but is specifically designed for Chrome and Chromium browsers. Puppeteer is often considered faster for browser automation tasks, especially with headless Chrome.
WebdriverIO is an automation library that wraps around the W3C WebDriver API. It provides a simpler API compared to selenium-webdriver and integrates well with modern testing frameworks. WebdriverIO supports both web and mobile browsers, making it a versatile choice for cross-platform testing.
Nightwatch.js is an automated testing framework for web applications and websites, written in Node.js. It uses the W3C WebDriver API for browser automation. It is designed to simplify the process of setting up continuous integration and writing automated tests. Nightwatch has a cleaner syntax compared to selenium-webdriver, which might be easier for beginners.
FAQs
The official WebDriver JavaScript bindings from the Selenium project
The npm package selenium-webdriver receives a total of 674,660 weekly downloads. As such, selenium-webdriver popularity was classified as popular.
We found that selenium-webdriver demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 6 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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