[🐛 Bug]: selenium-manager returns multiple lines when chromedriver has been installed through npm

[cosmo0]

What happened?

Source of the issue of SeleniumHQ/selenium-ide#1594

With a certain configuration (see below) selenium-manager returns multiple lines, and selenium-side-runner cannot process it because it expects a single result, on a single line.

selenium-side-runner could be changed to process multiple lines, but the first line returned by selenium-manager is the Unix shell script (installed by npm), which is obviously not runnable on Windows. So it's not possible to know which line is the right one.

How can we reproduce the issue?

As per the documentation: https://www.selenium.dev/selenium-ide/docs/en/introduction/command-line-runner

• Install ChromeDriver through npm: npm install -g chromedriver
• Run selenium-manager.exe -b chrome

=> multiple lines are returned.

> npm install -g chromedriver
> .\selenium-manager.exe -b chrome
 INFO    D:\Users\cosmo\AppData\Roaming\npm\chromedriver
 D:\Users\cosmo\AppData\Roaming\npm\chromedriver.cmd

If I uninstall the npm chromedriver, it returns a completely different output.

> npm uninstall -g chromedriver
> .\selenium-manager.exe -b chrome
INFO    D:\Users\cosmo\.cache\selenium\chromedriver\win32\110.0.5481.77\chromedriver.exe`

Operating System

Windows 10

Selenium version

selenium-side-runner 4.0.0-alpha.42
selenium-manager 1.0.0-M3

[github-actions]

@cosmo0, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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Thank you!

[cosmo0]

Well, apparently it just uses the where command from Windows, which returns multiple entries.

https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/blob/trunk/rust/src/lib.rs#L252-L258

And sure enough...

> where chromedriver
D:\Users\cosmo\AppData\Roaming\npm\chromedriver
D:\Users\cosmo\AppData\Roaming\npm\chromedriver.cmd

It also means that if, for some reason, I have multiple "executable-looking" files named "chromedriver" in my PATH, it returns all of them. Example if I create dummy ".exe" and ".bat" files next to the "real" ones:

> where chromedriver
D:\Users\cosmo\AppData\Roaming\npm\chromedriver
D:\Users\cosmo\AppData\Roaming\npm\chromedriver.bat
D:\Users\cosmo\AppData\Roaming\npm\chromedriver.cmd
D:\Users\cosmo\AppData\Roaming\npm\chromedriver.exe

Not sure what should be done at this point, especially since Windows doesn't have the "is executable" flag like *nix does.

Maybe the simplest solution would be to try to run each of them in succession with the --version arg, and return the most recent one? It turns out all drivers accept this arg and return a first line formatted in the same way.

> .\chromedriver.exe --version
ChromeDriver 110.0.5481.77 (65ed616c6e8ee3fe0ad64fe83796c020644d42af-refs/branch-heads/5481@{#839})
> .\geckodriver.exe --version
geckodriver 0.32.2 (602aa16c20d4 2023-02-08 00:09 +0000)

The source code of this program is available from
testing/geckodriver in https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central.

This program is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License 2.0.
You can obtain a copy of the license at https://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.
>  .\msedgedriver.exe --version
Microsoft Edge WebDriver 110.0.1587.63 (b26c9b8fc01e4ee6478cd1585db0bdec672b52a6)

Another solution would be to not copy the *nix shell script in the npm chromedriver package, but that would not solve the issue in case of users with "chromedriver.xxx" files in their path.

[bonigarcia]

Yes, that is a bug in the Rust side. Thanks a lot for reporting. I'll try to fix it for the next release of selenium-manager.