I need to install chromedriver on Windows OS. In the article below they specify:
https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/getting-started
"...ChromeDriver expects you to have Chrome installed in the default location for your platform..."
But I'm not sure what is the default location ?
On Mac OS it's /usr/local/bin.
With this I don't have to specify path explicitly or setup system path either.
How to achieve the same on Windows OS?
For any driver that Selenium must use to open the browser (chromedriver, geckodriver, etc), you don't have to worry about where it is installed, as long as it's set in the PATH variable.
If you have it set in the OS PATH variable, you must be able to run it from the command or cmd (it's always good to make sure it's working).
Here's how you can set it (append to the existing value):
Then you can just instantiate it as follows:
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
OR
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
Hope it's somehow helpful.
/usr/local/bin is in the PATH (usr is a short to User System Resources, not user). To check that, open a terminal in a Linux/Mac and type env | grep PATH to check it is there. So, in Linux/Mac, when you install/copy to /usr/local/bin, you're already installing in a folder seen by the PATH variable. I'm not sure the command env works on Windows, but you can still run echo %PATH% to show all the directories listed by it. –
Gwenn These are two interrelated important questions as follows :
You can download the recently released ChromeDriver from ChromeDriver - WebDriver for Chrome page and place it any where within your system. When you initialize the ChromeDriver you need to pass the absolute path of the ChromeDriver binary.
Additionally, you can also help WebDriver to locate the downloaded ChromeDriver executable through the following steps :
webdriver.chrome.driver system propertywebdriver.Chrome()The most important fact is you need to ensure that Chromium/Google Chrome is installed in a recognized location as per the ChromeDriver - Requirements as the server expects you to have Chromium/Google Chrome installed in the default location for each system as per the snapshot:
Note : For Linux systems, the ChromeDriver expects /usr/bin/google-chrome to be a symlink to the actual Chrome binary. You can also override the Chrome binary location following Using a Chrome executable in a non-standard location .
Java :
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
public class A_Chrome
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
// Optional : if not specified WebDriver will search your system PATH environment variable for locating the chromedriver
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\path\\to\\chromedriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
driver.get("https://www.google.co.in");
System.out.println(driver.getTitle());
driver.quit();
}
}
Python :
from selenium import webdriver
# Optional argument : if not specified WebDriver will search your system PATH environment variable for locating the chromedriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=r'C:\path\to\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get('https://www.google.co.in')
print("Page Title is : %s" %driver.title)
driver.quit()
For any driver that Selenium must use to open the browser (chromedriver, geckodriver, etc), you don't have to worry about where it is installed, as long as it's set in the PATH variable.
If you have it set in the OS PATH variable, you must be able to run it from the command or cmd (it's always good to make sure it's working).
Here's how you can set it (append to the existing value):
Then you can just instantiate it as follows:
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
OR
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
Hope it's somehow helpful.
/usr/local/bin is in the PATH (usr is a short to User System Resources, not user). To check that, open a terminal in a Linux/Mac and type env | grep PATH to check it is there. So, in Linux/Mac, when you install/copy to /usr/local/bin, you're already installing in a folder seen by the PATH variable. I'm not sure the command env works on Windows, but you can still run echo %PATH% to show all the directories listed by it. –
Gwenn Default location on Windows is: C:\Program Files\(select the folder you want to put your file)\chromedriver.exe
In your Selenium code, paste the driver path correctly, for example:
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Program Files\\Java\\chromedriver.exe");
If you are using a Python virtual environment with 'virtualenv'. You can drop the chromedriver.exe in your virtual environment's bin/ directory.
> virtual venv
> cd Users/username/Downloads/chromedriver(.exe) working/directory/path/venv/bin/
Then try running the Python script with the virtual env's interpreter.
I have found that to download the package to your desktop and to point to it in your program is just the simplest and easiest solution
I found a link for the standalone package here.
You can then point to the package with a little bit of code like the following.
from selenium import webdriver
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import time
import pandas as pd
driver = webdriver.Chrome("The-Path-To-The-Web-Driver")
My chromedriver package was installed in my Python folder. If I remember correctly, I installed it with pip. The strange thing is that the chromedriver folder did not contain the chromedriver.exe file, which I had to download and move to the site-packages folder separately.
C:\\Users\\_USERNAME_\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Python\\Python37\\Lib\\site-packages\\chromedriver
(I use double \:s in the path because a single \ plus the letter U (in C:-->\U<--sers...) would result in
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape
)
Interestingly i didnt find a single entry pointing me to the right direction for me, however, checking my installation via which chromedriver revealed that my correct location was:
/opt/homebrew/bin/chromedriver
I stumbled upon this because i first tried downloading the binary which was version 114 and then installed via brew version 126 which presented a mismatch. To me installing via proved more stable.
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