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Simplify Environment Setup with Selenium Manager
Improve how you stay up-to-date on the latest browser drivers. With shorter release cycles, it can be difficult to keep drivers in sync with browser versions. Selenium Manager automatically configures the browser drivers for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
Selenium has been a core ingredient of Sauce Labs since its inception. When co-founders Jason Huggins (creator of Selenium), John Dunham, and Al Sargent formed the company in 2008, they came up with the company name as an acronym for Selenium Acceleration Using Cloud Execution.
Thus, Selenium and the open source community are strategic pieces in the Sauce Labs mission. A group of Saucers work full-time in contributing and supporting open source in the Sauce Labs Open Source Program Office(OSPO). I was honored to become part of the OSPO team in May 2022, contributing to the Selenium project. One of the most significant contributions so far is the creation of Selenium Manager.
We created Selenium Manager to simplify environment setup for anyone running Selenium tests. While setting up drivers is not a difficult task, it can be a frustrating one. Complicated by the shortened release cycles for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browsers, maintenance is a hassle. Rather than getting repeated error messages and having to search the web for answers, Selenium Manager will configure the browser drivers if they are not on the PATH.
To put it plainly: If you’re new to Selenium, you’ll find that the time needed to run a test will be shorter. If you run tests on a CI/CD system, the environment configuration will be simpler. And if you’re a seasoned user, you’ll no longer need to focus on driver configuration; instead you can use that energy to create good tests for your team and company.
Selenium Manager is the official driver manager of the Selenium project. It has been developed as a CLI (Command-Line Interface) tool in Rust, and it has been built with the lessons learned from the development and maintenance of WebDriverManager since 2015. This first beta version of Selenium Manager was released in September 2022. You can find the Selenium Manager source code on the public GitHub Selenium repository.
Selenium Manager provides a robust mechanism (inherited from WebDriverManager) to detect the version of the local browser to be controlled with Selenium WebDriver, download the proper driver, and make it available for Selenium WebDriver.
Seamless Integration with Selenium
To use Selenium Manager is effortless! Just update your Selenium project to release 4.6.0. Since that version, each official Selenium binding (Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, C#) is shipped with Selenium Manager, so when the driver is not found, Selenium Manager resolves the driver automatically.
Selenium Manager is still in development, so features will be added and bugs fixed with each release. Members of the Selenium community are a key part of the success of this tool. We look forward to getting feedback from the community!
