Workaround for wrong chromedriver version

[carlos-gva]

I noticed that when using the webdriver-manager update command it downloads the Chromedriver v74.x.x and it only runs with the Chrome v74, which I don't have on my machine yet because the latest Chrome stable version is v73.

So, this stopped working...

Why this started to download and apply this chromedriver versions?

[21stChannel]

Same issue here. I now force the job to use a static version (2.46) as workaround, but it's not ideal.

[r1b]

Is there an implicit assumption here that Google will not publish a beta version of chromedriver to this list [1]? If this assumption is reality, I think this is on Google. webdriver-manager simply grabs the latest version from that list [2].

[1] https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/
[2] https://github.com/angular/webdriver-manager/blob/master/lib/provider/utils/version_list.ts#L57-L74

[21stChannel]

Is there an implicit assumption here that Google will not publish a beta version of chromedriver to this list [1]? If this assumption is reality, I think this is on Google. webdriver-manager simply grabs the latest version from that list [2].

[1] https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/
[2] https://github.com/angular/webdriver-manager/blob/master/lib/provider/utils/version_list.ts#L57-L74

Here are some observations:

1. Protractor 6.0.0 comes with webdriver-manager 13.0.0, webdriver-manager 13.0.0 grabs the beta chromedriver.
2. Protractor 5.4.2 comes with webdriver-manager 12.1.1, and v12.1.1 grabs chromedriver 2.46, which is the version works with stable Chrome.

I suspect the protractor 6.0.0 and webdriver-manager 13.0.0 both have some issues.

[rajarshi-singh]

@21stChannel Thanks for update, I was able to do the same ugly workaround to unblock my integration with Protractor 6.0:

webdriver-manager update --versions.chrome=2.46

[cnishina]

So the intent was to always download the latest. This was the case in the previous webdriver-manager. It only downloaded the latest 2.xx version because of a regex error. After two years of this being the case, it appears ChromeDriver released something that does not align with Chrome.

Anyway, we were discussing a new feature prior to the ChromeDriver-gate issue we are seeing. We were proposing to

• Download Chromium and ChromeDriver together. Pinning the version via only major version. So if you want 73, it will download the latest 73 ChromeDriver and Chromium
• Query the Chrome version you have installed and try to download a matching ChromeDriver. I'm not sure if this is valid since Chrome might not be installed in a typical location and also the command line might not be exposed to get the version.

Yes the workaround is to pin the version for chromedriver. I had to do this for the Protractor repo. This is unfortunately the solution / workaround for now until Chrome 74 is released.

[cnishina]

Speaking of getting things to work, I tagged the latest Protractor to 5.4.2 since that version is pretty stable. That means, webdriver-manager will be at version 12-something. Maybe Chrome 74 will drop when I get these fixes in.

[carlos-gva]

I also did that workaround to pin the ChromeDriver v73 to be downloaded.

thanks @cnishina for the update 🙂

[cnishina]

Maybe we can add something to the readme file? I think this could be helpful since it is maybe something that could be fixed in the future but I don't think there is bandwidth right now to take this on. @carlos-gva would you mind updating the README?

[carlos-gva]

@cnishina done.

[cnishina]

Adding some additional information about why webdriver-manager is doing what its doing:

• we download the xml file: https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/ In this file, there is no beta version or metadata around 74 being in beta.
• if i downloaded https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/74.0.3729.6/notes.txt it still does not appear there, so this would not be a good way to solve the problem.

From webdriver-manager's point of view, we would have to know the version of Chrome on the current working machine. I'm not 100% sure how to get this information from each machine programatically.

[carlos-gva]

Getting this info from each machine seems to be really tricky and probably does not deserve that effort.