Selenium Manager: Automated Driver & Browser Management for Selenium WebDriver - Boni García

Selenium Manager: Automated Driver & Browser Management for Selenium WebDriver - Boni García, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Selenium WebDriver is an open source library that allows controlling web browsers (e.g., Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.) programmatically using different languages (such as Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, or C#). Internally, Selenium WebDriver uses the native support implemented by each browser to carry out the automation process. For this reason, we need to place a component called driver (e.g., chromedriver, geckodriver, msedgedriver, etc.) between the script using the Selenium WebDriver API and the browser.

Historically, the Selenium project did not cover the automated management (understood as the process of download, setup, and maintenance) of drivers. For this reason, different projects in the Selenium ecosystem emerged to do this task (such as WebDriverManager in Java or webdriver-manager in Python, among others). As of Selenium 4.6.0, automated driver management is shipped in Selenium WebDriver out of the box. This way, the driver management is done automatically and transparently for all Selenium WebDriver binding languages. This process is done through a new official tool of the Selenium portfolio called Selenium Manager.

Selenium Manager is a CLI tool developed in Rust. It provides a robust mechanism to detect the version of the local browser to be controlled with Selenium WebDriver, download the proper driver, and make it available for Selenium WebDriver. Moreover, Selenium Manager has another relevant feature in its roadmap: the automatic management (i.e., download and installation) of browsers (such as Chrome, Firefox, or Edge).

Selenium Manager has been built with the lessons learned from the development of WebDriverManager (first released in 2015). This way, the history of Selenium Manager is the history of how an independent third-party project has become part of the Selenium code development.
Outline/Structure

The history of Selenium Manager
Automated driver management
Design and implementation in Rust
Integration with the binding languages
Automated browser management
Future work
Summary and outlook

Learning Outcome

- Benefits of automated driver management (vs. manual)
- Selenium Manager features: CLI tool, seamless integration with Selenium WebDriver
Target Audience
All Selenium developers.
Links

- Selenium Manager source code: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/tree/trunk/rust
- Author home page: https://bonigarcia.dev/

Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should) also be automated as well. For more infomation check out: https://www.selenium.dev/

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