Get started with ChromeDriver

This page documents how to start using ChromeDriver for testing your website on desktop (Windows/Mac/Linux). You can also read Getting Started with Android or Getting Started with ChromeOS.

Setup

ChromeDriver is a separate executable that Selenium WebDriver uses to control Chrome. It is maintained by the Chromium team with help from WebDriver contributors. If you are unfamiliar with Selenium WebDriver, you should check out the Selenium site.

Follow these steps to setup your tests for running with ChromeDriver:

Any of these steps should work:

  1. Include the ChromeDriver location in your PATH environment variable
  2. (Java only) Specify its location using the webdriver.chrome.driver system property (see sample below)
  3. (Python only) Include the path to ChromeDriver when instantiating webdriver.Chrome. See the following samples.

Sample Java test

import org.openqa.selenium.*;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.*;
import org.junit.Test;
public class GettingStarted {   
@Test   
public void testGoogleSearch() throws InterruptedException {
  // Optional. If not specified, WebDriver searches the PATH for chromedriver.
  // System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "/path/to/chromedriver");
  // WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
  driver.get("http://www.google.com/"); 
  Thread.sleep(5000);  // Let the user actually see something!
  WebElement searchBox = driver.findElement(By.name("q"));
  searchBox.sendKeys("ChromeDriver");
  searchBox.submit(); 
  Thread.sleep(5000);  // Let the user actually see something!
  driver.quit();  
 }
}

Sample Python test

import time
from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome('/path/to/chromedriver')  # Optional argument, if not specified will search path.
driver.get('http://www.google.com/');
time.sleep(5) # Let the user actually see something!
search_box = driver.find_element_by_name('q')
search_box.send_keys('ChromeDriver')
search_box.submit()
time.sleep(5) # Let the user actually see something!
driver.quit()

Control ChromeDriver's lifetime

The ChromeDriver class starts the ChromeDriver server process at creation and terminates it when quit is called. This can waste a significant amount of time for large test suites where a ChromeDriver instance is created per test. There are two options to remedy this, ChromeDriverService and starting ChromeDriver separately.

ChromeDriverService

Use the ChromeDriverService. This is available for most languages and lets you start or stop the ChromeDriver server yourself. Here's a Java example, with JUnit 4:

import java.io.*;
import org.junit.*;
import org.openqa.selenium.*;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.*;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.*;
public class GettingStartedWithService {
  private static ChromeDriverService service;
  private WebDriver driver;
  @BeforeClass
  public static void createAndStartService() throws IOException {
      service = new ChromeDriverService.Builder()
              .usingDriverExecutable(new File("/path/to/chromedriver"))
              .usingAnyFreePort()
              .build();
      service.start();
  }
  
  @AfterClass   
  public static void stopService() {
    service.stop();
  }

  @Before   
  public void createDriver() {
    driver = new RemoteWebDriver(service.getUrl(), new ChromeOptions());
  }

  @After   public void quitDriver() {
    driver.quit();
  }

  @Test   
  public void testGoogleSearch() {
    driver.get("http://www.google.com");
    // rest of the test...
  }
}

Python:

import time
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
service = Service('/path/to/chromedriver')
service.start()
driver = webdriver.Remote(service.service_url)
driver.get('http://www.google.com/');
time.sleep(5) # Let the user actually see something!
driver.quit()

Start ChromeDriver separately

Start the ChromeDriver server separately before running your tests, and connect to it using the Remote WebDriver.

Terminal:

$ ./chromedriver
Starting ChromeDriver
76.0.3809.68 (...) on port 9515
...

Java:

import java.net.*;
import org.openqa.selenium.*;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.*;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.*;  

public class GettingStartedRemote {

  public static void main(String[] args) throws MalformedURLException {
    WebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(
        new URL("http://127.0.0.1:9515"),
        new ChromeOptions());
    driver.get("http://www.google.com");
    driver.quit();
  }
}