Automated chromedriver management on windows agents

When it comes to Web testing, we always have to test on latest and latest-1 version of web browsers. While that is smooth in manual testing but it becomes challenging while running an automation suite on windows agents since with each browser version we might need to update browser drivers.

Today, there are many readymade code modules available which will handle this problem and you would have to send browser version as input but that demands an additional package installation and you might not want that. Recently we faced a similar issue when our tests were running on a pipeline with windows agent and we had to update chromedriver for our tests to run successfully. We did not want to hardcode driver or driver version and so we used a small PowerShell script and embedded that as a step in the pipeline code.

Now this script will always check for the version of chrome browser and will download the suitable chromedriver if it is not already present in the project directory. This script made it this entire process of getting the latest chromedriver automated without human intervention and thus saved lots of our time.

Here is the script and I hope it will be useful for people having windows agents.

$thisScriptRoot = "c:\agent\_work\1\s\"    #path of your workdirctory

$chromeDriverRelativeDir = "browsers"      #path where chromedriver needs to be copied
$chromeDriverDir = $(Join-Path $thisScriptRoot $chromeDriverRelativeDir)
$chromeDriverFileLocation = $(Join-Path $chromeDriverDir "chromedriver.exe")
$chromeVersion = [System.Diagnostics.FileVersionInfo]::GetVersionInfo("C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe").FileVersion
$chromeMajorVersion = $chromeVersion.split(".")[0]

if (-Not (Test-Path $chromeDriverDir -PathType Container)) {
  New-Item -ItemType directory -Path $chromeDriverDir
}

if (Test-Path $chromeDriverFileLocation -PathType Leaf) {
  # get version of curent chromedriver.exe
  $chromeDriverFileVersion = (& $chromeDriverFileLocation --version)
  $chromeDriverFileVersionHasMatch = $chromeDriverFileVersion -match "ChromeDriver (\d+\.\d+\.\d+(\.\d+)?)"
  $chromeDriverCurrentVersion = $matches[1]

  if (-Not $chromeDriverFileVersionHasMatch) {
    Exit
  }
}
else {
  # if chromedriver.exe not found, will download it
  $chromeDriverCurrentVersion = ''
}

if ($chromeMajorVersion -lt 73) {
  # for chrome versions < 73 will use chromedriver v2.46 (which supports chrome v71-73)
  $chromeDriverExpectedVersion = "2.46"
  $chromeDriverVersionUrl = "https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/LATEST_RELEASE"
}
else {
  $chromeDriverExpectedVersion = $chromeVersion.split(".")[0..2] -join "."
  $chromeDriverVersionUrl = "https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/LATEST_RELEASE_" + $chromeDriverExpectedVersion
}

$chromeDriverLatestVersion = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $chromeDriverVersionUrl

Write-Output "chrome version:       $chromeVersion"
Write-Output "chromedriver version: $chromeDriverCurrentVersion"
Write-Output "chromedriver latest:  $chromeDriverLatestVersion"

# will update chromedriver.exe if MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH
$needUpdateChromeDriver = $chromeDriverCurrentVersion -ne $chromeDriverLatestVersion
if ($needUpdateChromeDriver) {
  $chromeDriverZipLink = "https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/" + $chromeDriverLatestVersion + "/chromedriver_win32.zip"
  Write-Output "Will download $chromeDriverZipLink"

  $chromeDriverZipFileLocation = $(Join-Path $chromeDriverDir "chromedriver_win32.zip")

  Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $chromeDriverZipLink -OutFile $chromeDriverZipFileLocation
  Expand-Archive $chromeDriverZipFileLocation -DestinationPath $(Join-Path $thisScriptRoot $chromeDriverRelativeDir) -Force
  Remove-Item -Path $chromeDriverZipFileLocation -Force
  $chromeDriverFileVersion = (& $chromeDriverFileLocation --version)
  Write-Output "chromedriver updated to version $chromeDriverFileVersion"
}
else {
  Write-Output "chromedriver is actual"
}