Selenium 4 dynamic grid - add support for get downloaded files to your host path

[rdark100]

🚀 Feature Proposal

Selenium 4 Dynamic Grid - get downloaded files from eg. /home/seluser/Downloads to your host path. It should be same as get video file when you have to mount your host path (/path/on/your/host/machine:/opt/selenium/assets)

[diemol]

I think we could implement an endpoint that allows a user download the file(s) from the session. Mounting volumes might work well for local Docker deployments but it gets complicated when Grid is deployed without Docker or it gets deployed through Docker Swarm or Kubernetes.

However, this is not a priority right now, as we are focusing on the Selenium 4 release.

As usually, all contributions are welcome.

[diemol]

Actually, I am now questioning myself if we should do this or not. What is the use case, @rdark100?

[brendon-r]

I know the Selenium docs discourage using Selenium to perform file downloads but that's our most reliable way of performing our testing. We have an app that we test via downloaded files (specifically, we test Power BI charts by exporting them and comparing to the data source) and with Selenium Grid, I'd have to mess around with volume mounts to be able to get to the downloaded files. I've since switched to Selenosis mainly for this reason.

[rdark100]

I have similiar usage as @beerai . I tests exports of our tables and the export is not same as table in web browser - more columns in exported file (currency is separated, more decimal places defined, etc.)

[MartykQ]

This would be much more useful if it also worked in the other direction => sharing some files from the host machine to the container.
Use case: testing any kind of uploads/imports. Right now copying files from the host machine to the container directly is needed each time

[diemol]

@MartykQ this is already possible directly from the client, see: https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/webdriver/remote_webdriver/#local-file-detector

[ablok]

We also test that file generation works correctly by downloading files and checking their contents and would like to use the dynamic grid for these tests. We don't really have another way of testing that this works e2e.
File generation is dependant on some client side info (session/cookie/data) which makes it pretty difficult to easily generate a direct download as an alternative. Having an endpoint for downloading files of the client would be super useful.