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

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.

Make sure the gem is being required in order to configure the Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome.driver_path:

require "chromedriver-helper"

Otherwise you may see failures like "unable to connect to chromedriver 127.0.0.1:9515 (Selenium::WebDriver::Error::WebDriverError)" when Selenium runs the wrong executable.

If you're using Bundler and Capybara in a Rails project, it's as easy as:

# Gemfile
gem "selenium-webdriver"
gem "chromedriver-helper"

then, in your spec setup:

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

If you're using it standlone just to manage chromedriver binaries,

# Gemfile
gem "chromedriver-helper"

Then just run the executable script:

chromedriver-helper

which will download chromedriver if necessary and exec it.

There are some commandline options that can be sent to chromedriver as options to Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new. The supported options can be discovered by looking at the Selenium source code here:

https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/blob/master/rb/lib/selenium/webdriver/chrome/service.rb

As of this writing, the supported options are:

• log_path
• url_base
• port_server
• whitelisted_ips
• verbose
• silent

An example usage would be:

Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app, browser: :chrome,
  driver_opts: {
    log_path: '/tmp/chrome.log',
    verbose: true
  })

You can always update to the latest version of chromedriver:

chromedriver-update

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

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

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

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 flavorjones#57.)

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.

MIT licensed, see LICENSE.txt for full details.

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.