[🚀 Feature]: Add option to use chromedriver managed by Selenium Manager if PATH version not compatible

[stanhu]

Feature and motivation

We have a number of engineers who have chromedriver managed by Homebrew. When Chrome updates, they need to keep up-to-date with the latest chromedriver. Currently selenium-webdriver will download the right version of chromedriver ONLY if the Homebrew version is NOT installed.

Uninstalling the Homebrew version doesn't seem like it should be necessary. We would much prefer if selenium-webdriver would download and use the right version of chromedriver if the version in PATH isn't compatible.

One possible fix would be to drop the Platform.find_binary call here:

selenium/rb/lib/selenium/webdriver/common/driver_finder.rb

Lines 26 to 29 in d530584

	path ||= Platform.find_binary(klass::EXECUTABLE)
	path ||= begin
	SeleniumManager.driver_path(options)

As far as I understand, selenium-manager already looks in the PATH:

selenium/rust/src/lib.rs

Line 318 in b579892

if let (Some(version), Some(path)) = self.find_driver_in_path() {

Usage example

This would allow the Homebrew version of chromedriver to coexist with the version managed by selenium-webdriver.

[github-actions]

@stanhu, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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[stanhu]

A workaround is to set the PATH to give precedence to the binary detected by selenium-manager:

chrome_options = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.chrome
chromedriver_path = File.dirname(Selenium::WebDriver::SeleniumManager.driver_path(chrome_options))

Inside the Capybara.register_server, set the PATH:

ENV['PATH'] = "#{chromedriver_path}:#{ENV['PATH']}"

[titusfortner]

Yes, this matches where we are planning to go. We're tracking this already, elsewhere. Here is an explanation of where we are, and the steps for where we want to go:
#11356 (comment)

There are a few complications we need to handle that make this non-trivial:

• We want Selenium Manager to be entirely "opt-in" right now, which means if you are doing anything to manage drivers yourself, SM won't try to do it for you
• If we do decide to do automatic fixes for users, we'll need to provide a way for them to completely opt-out from using SM (no downloading ever)
• Also, users can intentionally use an old version of the driver by passing in a specific argument to the driver, so we'll need to parse that and pass it in as a flag to SM somehow as to whether to fix or use the outdated driver

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.