Running tests on Google Chrome using Webdriver

While automating your web-application using webdriver, many may have faced problems in executing your cases on Google-chrome. Whenever you try to use webdriver object for executing your cases on chrome using the following code:

DesiredCapabilities capability = DesiredCapabilities.chrome();

you most probably get the following error:

The path to the chromedriver executable must be set by the webdriver.chrome.driver system property; for more information, see http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/ChromeDriver. The latest version can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/chromium/downloads/list

The solution to this error that has been mentioned in the given URL  "http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/ChromeDriver" is  to set the chromedriver path to the variable "webdriver.chrome.driver". But how exactly to set the path and use it for your test execution is not given there. So I though to just document it here on my blog.

For setting the  "webdriver.chrome.driver" value and for using google-chrome to execute your automated tests, you can use one of the following methods:

Method - 1:
Start the selenium server using the following command:

java -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=/path/to/chromedriver  -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.7.0.jar

And in your Java code you use the chrome driver in the following way:

DesiredCapabilities capability = DesiredCapabilities.chrome();
WebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(new URL("http://localhost:4444/wd/hub"), capability);

The advantage of using this method is that you can execute your test-cases in a remote machine and this is advantageous when you want to run it on grid.


Method - 2:
Set the system property  "webdriver.chrome.driver" using System.setProperty()  in your code and then try to execute your cases on Chrome.

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "/path/to/chromedriver");
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

This method works well when your tests are getting execute on a local machine and you are not starting any selenium server.

Following are some important links for Chrome driver:
Webdriver Chromedriver page:
http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/ChromeDriver


ChromeDriver download page for downloading the ChromeDriver server:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/downloads/list