Setup of Selenium + geckodriver is now well-simplified

As written in the past post, I had been using foxr, a thin library of the Firefox marionette remote protocol, to automatically control Firefox. However, some of automated procedure didn’t work now, so I switched to the standard-way setup of Selenium WebDriver with geckodriver. I found its setup had become much simpler.

TL;DR

npm i geckodriver selenium-webdriver

const { Builder } = require('selenium-webdriver');
const firefox = require('selenium-webdriver/firefox');

require('geckodriver');

const options = new firefox.Options()
  .headless();
//.setBinary(executablePath);

const driver = await new Builder()
  .forBrowser('firefox')
  .setFirefoxOptions(options)
  .build();

No need to download geckodriver manually

A NPM package geckodriver is a downloader for https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases.

When you install this package, it will start downloading geckodriver as follows:

% npm i geckodriver --save

> geckodriver@1.21.1 postinstall /tmp/a/node_modules/geckodriver
> node index.js

Downloading geckodriver... Extracting... Complete.

geckodriver is available at node_modules/.bin/geckodriver and node_modules/geckodriver/geckodriver.

No need to add geckodriver to the system PATH manually

require('geckodriver') adds the directory where geckodriver is located to the system PATH.

const assert = require('assert');
const path = require('path');

require('geckodriver');
assert.equal(process.env.PATH.split(path.delimiter)
  .includes(path.resolve('node_modules/geckodriver')), true);

Instead of manually downloading the geckodriver file and configuring the system PATH, you can simply add this library to the package.json dependencies.

Just only use selenium-webdriver/firefox

Hence, if you simply add require('geckodriver'), it will work fine!

const { Builder } = require('selenium-webdriver');
const firefox = require('selenium-webdriver/firefox');

require('geckodriver');

const options = new firefox.Options()
  .headless();
//.setBinary(executablePath);

const driver = await new Builder()
  .forBrowser('firefox')
  .setFirefoxOptions(options)
  .build();