How to Run Webdriver in chrome browser?

Normally to run webdriver, we just need a browser and a selenium server jar file. Selenium by-default supports Mozilla Firefox browser. Then the next question come to your mind is How to run webdriver in other browsers.

Selenium supports to run webdriver in other browsers by just adding an .exe path of the driver server for the individual browsers.

Now to run selenium webdriver in Chrome browser, we need to take the help of ChromeDriver which is a separate executable that selenium webdriver uses to control chrome. ChromeDriver is supported by the Chromium team, ChromeDriver is a standalone server which implements WebDriver's wire protocol for Chromium.

First of all, download latest version of ChromeDriver server for webdriver. You can download latest version of ChromeDriver server from Download Chrome Server

Note: Choose the chromedriver based on your working environment. If you are working on windows environment, you need to click on "Chromedriver_win32.zip".
Save the downloaded file to your local machine.

In your code you need to set the property for chrome driver, specify its location via the webdriver.chrome.driver as below
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "pathofchromedriver\\chromedriver.exe");

If you dint set the path / or if you give the wrong path, then you will be seeing below error immediately once you start your script
Error: The path to the driver executable must be set by the webdriver.chrome.driver system property

Please find the below example program using java. After writing the below code, execute it to run your test in chrome browser which will first open chrome browser and validate Google Home Page Title.

package com.test;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.AfterClass;
import org.testng.annotations.BeforeClass;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

public class TestChromeBrowser {
 
 static String driverPath = "path to chrome driver";
 public WebDriver driver;
 
 @BeforeClass
 public void setUp() {
  System.out.println("*******************");
  System.out.println("launching chrome browser");
  System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", driverPath+"chromedriver.exe");
  driver = new ChromeDriver();
  driver.manage().window().maximize();
 }
 
 @Test
 public void testGooglePageTitleInIEBrowser() {
  driver.navigate().to("http://www.google.com");
  String strPageTitle = driver.getTitle();
  System.out.println("Page title: - "+strPageTitle);
  Assert.assertTrue(strPageTitle.equalsIgnoreCase("Google"), "Page title doesn't match");
 }

 @AfterClass
 public void tearDown() {
  if(driver!=null) {
   System.out.println("Closing chrome browser");
   driver.quit();
  }
 }
 
}

When working with chrome driver, you may face few issues like Element is Not Clickable because of many reasons and there are many work arounds to solve the problem. You can check all the work arounds for 'Element is not clickable' error

As many of them keep asking about a message which displays when your start execution with chrome driver like"starting chromedriver on port xxxxx only local connections are allowed"

This message is just for an information only. It is telling you is that "chromedriver" executable will only accept connections from the local machine.

As most driver implementations ( let it be Chrome driver / IE driver ) creates an HTTP server, and the language bindings (Java / Python / . etc.) use a JsonWireProtocol to communicate with the driver, and automate the browser.

Naturally, since the HTTP server is simply listening on an open port for HTTP requests generated by the language bindings, connections to the HTTP server started by the language bindings are restricted to only be allowed to come from other processes on the same host.