Say GoodBye to Driver.exe !!

As we all know, while using Selenium WebDriver for each browser such as Chrome, Firefox, MS Edge or IE, we need to first separately download its binary file which allows, WebDriver to handle browsers then we need to provide the absolute path of this binary in the system properties to launch the respective browsers.

It is actually quite frustrating as we need to manually check for a different version, install and use this binary files in our automation scripts.

WebDriver Manager is a solution to all these problems. WebDriver Manager allows us to:

ü  It checks the version of the browser installed in your machine (e.g. Chrome, Firefox).

ü  It checks the version of the driver (e.g. chrome driver, geckodriver). If unknown, it uses the latest version of the driver.

ü  It downloads the WebDriver binary if it is not present on the WebDriverManager cache (~/.m2/repository/webdriver by default).

ü  It exports the proper WebDriver Java environment variables required by Selenium (not done when using WebDriverManager from the CLI or as a Server)


To Know more about WebDriver Manager. Please click on this link.

To use WebDriver Manager we need to download its maven dependency by using this link.

In this blog for demo purposes, I am using below maven dependency.

Now in our automation script instead of writing the below line of code

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "/absolute/path/to/binary/chromedriver");

System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "/absolute/path/to/binary/geckodriver");

We can use below code to launch chrome browser

WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup();

Below code to launch FireFox browser

WebDriverManager.firefoxdriver().setup();

Full Code would be something like:

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