Running Selenium on NodeJs

Question

This is my first attempt with selenium-webdriver on NodeJs in Windows 7 environment. Here is what I have done to try to make it work:

1. Installed NodeJs 7.5 (officially supported by Selenium as noted on their Git https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/tree/master/javascript/node/selenium-webdriver)
2. Installed selenium-webdriver using npm
3. Downloaded chromedriver.exe 2.27 to "C:\Selenium Utilities\chromedriver"
4. Added chromedriver to my PATH as C:\Selenium Utilities\chromedriver;

5. Added my first test from Selenium Git page:

   var webdriver = require('selenium-webdriver'),
           By = webdriver.By, until = webdriver.until;
   
   var driver = new webdriver.Builder()
       .forBrowser('chrome')
       .build();
   
   driver.get('http://www.google.com/ncr');
   driver.findElement(By.name('q')).sendKeys('webdriver');
   driver.findElement(By.name('btnG')).click();
   driver.wait(until.titleIs('webdriver - Google Search'), 1000);
   driver.quit();
   

6. Tried running test via node test.js

As a result, I get error saying (excerpts):

"...throw new Error('Do not know how to build driver: ' + browser"

"Error: Do not know how to build driver: C; did you forget to call usingServer(url)?"

What am I doing wrong? Do I need to run a separate Selenium server in order to run this?

Answer 1

Your code looked fine to me, so I ran it to check that. I can confirm it runs fine (on macOS Sierra). Here's a link to the repo I created.

It looks like you might need to extend the wait for the page title though, sometimes I found loading Google's page title took longer than a second.

Another option would be to try a hosted service, rather than setting up your own selenium server. There are a variety available, I've just made Obehave for exactly this purpose. There is zero setup required - you can start writing your tests straight away.

Answer 2

Install the chromedriver via npm.

npm install chromedriver --save-dev

Then add chrome on top of the js:

var chrome = require('selenium-webdriver/chrome');

Finally script:

var webdriver = require('selenium-webdriver'),
        By = webdriver.By, until = webdriver.until;
        var webdriver = require('selenium-webdriver');

var chrome = require('selenium-webdriver/chrome');

var driver = new webdriver.Builder()
    .forBrowser('chrome')
    .build();

driver.get('http://www.google.com/ncr').then(function(){
    driver.findElement(By.name('q')).sendKeys('webdriver');
    driver.findElement(By.name('btnK')).click();
    driver.quit();
});