chromedriver-helper

Concourse CI

Easy installation and use of chromedriver, the Chromium project's Selenium webdriver adapter.

Description

chromedriver-helper installs an executable, chromedriver-helper, in your gem path, and configures Selenium to invoke it as the web driver.

This script will, if necessary, download the appropriate binary for your platform and install it into ~/.chromedriver-helper, then exec it. Easy peasy!

Individual projects can even select which version of chromedriver they want to run.

Usage

If you're using Bundler and Capybara, it's as easy as:

# Gemfile
gem "chromedriver-helper"

then, in your specs:

Capybara.register_driver :selenium do |app|
  Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app, :browser => :chrome)
end

Updating to latest chromedriver

You can always update to the latest version of chromedriver:

chromedriver-update

Having problems updating?

If for whatever reason you're having problems getting chromedriver-helper to update to the latest chromedriver, try this:

  1. Delete the directory $HOME/.chromedriver-helper
  2. Run chromedriver-update

Specifying a version

If you want to run a specific version of chromedriver in your project, you can set the version in you testing setup like so:

Chromedriver.set_version "2.24"

Or, from the command line, you can choose a system-wide default:

chromedriver-update 2.24

Support

The code lives at http://github.com/flavorjones/chromedriver-helper. Open a Github Issue, or send a pull request! Thanks! You're the best.

Known Issues

chromedriver-helper affects other projects on my system

v1.2.0 and earlier installed an executable named chromedriver, which may cause confusion for apps on your system that are not using chromedriver-helper. v2.0.0 and later do not cause this problem.

The common symptom is an error message that looks like this:

Selenium::WebDriver::Error::WebDriverError: unable to connect to chromedriver 127.0.0.1:9515

First, confirm that we're talking about the same thing by running:

bundle exec ruby -e "system('chromedriver -v')"

and making sure you see something like:

.../rubygems_integration.rb:462:in `block in replace_bin_path': can't find executable chromedriver for gem chromedriver-helper (Gem::Exception)

If you see this message, then uninstall all versions of chromedriver-helper prior to v2.0.0; and make sure your other projects have updated to v2.0.0 or later.

(You can read more about this issue at https://github.com/flavorjones/chromedriver-helper/issues/57.)

CentOS 6 and 7

Some versions of chromedriver won't run on CentOS 6 and 7 due to the problems explained here. The error messages look something like:

chromedriver: /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found (required by /home/vagrant/.chromedriver-helper/linux64/chromedriver)
chromedriver: /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6: version `CXXABI_1.3.5' not found (required by /home/vagrant/.chromedriver-helper/linux64/chromedriver)
chromedriver: /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.14' not found (required by /home/vagrant/.chromedriver-helper/linux64/chromedriver)

You can get chromedriver to work on these systems by running the install_chrome.sh script on the page linked to above, and then making sure your chromedriver process has LD_LIBRARY_PATH set so that /opt/google/chrome/lib is present, e.g.

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/google/chrome/lib chromedriver-helper
Starting ChromeDriver 2.28.455506 (18f6627e265f442aeec9b6661a49fe819aeeea1f) on port 9515
Only local connections are allowed.

License

MIT licensed, see LICENSE.txt for full details.

Credit

The idea for this gem comes from @brianhempel's project chromedriver-gem which, despite the name, is not currently published on http://rubygems.org/.

Some improvements on the idea were taken from the installation process for standalone Phusion Passenger.