Selenium Tests in Kotlin: WebDriverManager

2 min readJun 8, 2021

Selenium WebDriver allows controlling different types of browsers (such as Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge, and so on) programmatically using different programming languages (Java, Kotlin, JavaScript, Python, C#, …). Browser is driven using a native mechanism, so we need a binary file (driver) in between the test using the WebDriver API and the actual browser

The following picture shows a fine-grained diagram of the different flavour of WebDriver binaries and browsers:

**WebDriver scenario for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, PhantomJS, Edge, and Internet Explorer**

Concerning Kotlin, in order to locate these drivers, the absolute path of the binary controlling the browser should be exported in a given environment variable before creating a WebDriver instance, as follows:

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "/path/to/chromedriver")
System.setProperty("webdriver.edge.driver", "C:/path/to/MicrosoftWebDriver.exe")
System.setProperty("phantomjs.binary.path", "/path/to/phantomjs")
System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "/path/to/geckodriver")
System.setProperty("webdriver.opera.driver", "/path/to/operadriver")
System.setProperty("webdriver.ie.driver", "C:/path/to/IEDriverServer.exe")

Driver management is painful

Driver (chromedriver, geckodriver, etc.) must be downloaded manually for the proper platform running the test (i.e. Windows, Linux, Mac)
A proper driver version must match the browser version.
Browser is constantly updated (and drivers too).
Tests are not portable (different operative systems, path to driver).

Here is a simple sollution..

WebDriverManager is a Java library that allows automating the management of the binary drivers (chromedriver, geckodriver, etc.) required by Selenium

The WebDriverManager API is quite simple, providing a singleton object for each of the above-mentioned browsers:

WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup()
WebDriverManager.phantomjs().setup()
WebDriverManager.edgedriver().setup()
WebDriverManager.iedriver().setup()
WebDriverManager.firefoxdriver().setup()
WebDriverManager.operadriver().setup()

WebDriverManager — Design