Ask for latest compatible driver?

[dmurdoch]

Please fill the following template:

Operating System:

MacOS 10.13.6

Please describe Expected behaviour

I'm trying to use RSelenium to drive Google Chrome. For a long time I've had chromever="latest"
in the RSelenium::rsDriver call; it passes the version to wdman::selenium, and that opens the driver.

Please describe Actual behaviour

Today the latest Chrome driver is 74.0.3729.6, which doesn't work with my Chrome 73.0.3683.75, so the rsDriver call fails. Here's what I see:

> RSelenium::rsDriver(verbose = TRUE, 
+                                port = 4567L, 
+                                chromever="latest",
+                                geckover = NULL, 
+                                phantomver = NULL)
checking Selenium Server versions:
BEGIN: PREDOWNLOAD
BEGIN: DOWNLOAD
BEGIN: POSTDOWNLOAD
checking chromedriver versions:
BEGIN: PREDOWNLOAD
BEGIN: DOWNLOAD
BEGIN: POSTDOWNLOAD
[1] "Connecting to remote server"

Selenium message:session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 74
  (Driver info: chromedriver=74.0.3729.6 (255758eccf3d244491b8a1317aa76e1ce10d57e9-refs/branch-heads/3729@{#29}),platform=Mac OS X 10.13.6 x86_64) (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace information)
Command duration or timeout: 1.16 seconds
Build info: version: '3.141.59', revision: 'e82be7d358', time: '2018-11-14T08:25:53'
System info: host: 'djmair3.local', ip: 'fe80:0:0:0:86b:ea4d:a09e:1599%en0', os.name: 'Mac OS X', os.arch: 'x86_64', os.version: '10.13.6', java.version: '1.8.0_71'
Driver info: driver.version: unknown

Could not open chrome browser.
Client error message:
	 Summary: SessionNotCreatedException
 	 Detail: A new session could not be created.
	 Further Details: run errorDetails method
Check server log for further details.
$client
[1] "No sessionInfo. Client browser is mostly likely not opened."

$server
Process Handle
command   : /private/var/folders/d6/s97fjjxd3_9353x_lwb692100000gn/T/RtmpDGdXRU/file606c956632.sh 
system id : 1563
state     : running

Is there some way to say "the latest compatible version" instead of the "latest"?

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

I think the only thing necessary is to try to open the latest chromedriver on a system that doesn't have Chrome 74.x.

[juyeongkim]

There isn't an automated way to do that yet, but you can list available chrome drivers and manually pass the compatible version to chromever in rsDriver().

> binman::list_versions("chromedriver")
$win32
[1] "73.0.3683.20" "73.0.3683.68" "74.0.3729.6" 

> rs <- RSelenium::rsDriver(chromever = "73.0.3683.68")

[salim-b]

There isn't an automated way to do that yet

I've written some logic a while ago that automatically determines the latest ChromeDriver version compatible with the stable Chrome binary of your system, see ropensci/RSelenium#221. It should work on Linux, macOS and Windows.

I'd be happy to revise that code (for example we shouldn't rely on binman::list_versions() since it just returns an error in the case of a fresh install where no ChromeDriver versions had been downloaded before and instead parse https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html directly) and submit a PR if you could provide some guidance.

[tavad]

I resorted to this code inside r, to download the latest driver automatically. This works for Linux.
You need wget and 7z installed on your system

library(rvest)
library(tidyverse)

chrome_driver_url <-
read_html("https://googlechromelabs.github.io/chrome-for-testing") |>
html_elements("table") |>
html_table()

chrome_driver_url <-
chrome_driver_url[[2]] |>
filter(Binary == "chromedriver", Platform == "linux64") |>
pull(URL)

directory_path <- "$HOME/.local/share/binman_chromedriver/linux64/"
version <- str_replace(chrome_driver_url, ".+/([\d\.]+)/.+", "\1")
folder_path <- paste0(directory_path, version)
system(paste("mkdir -p", folder_path))
system(paste0("wget -O ", folder_path, "/chromedriver_linux64.zip ", chrome_driver_url))
system(paste0("7z e ", folder_path, "/chromedriver_linux64.zip -o", folder_path))
system(paste("find", shQuote(directory_path),
"-type f -name 'LICENSE.chromedriver' -exec rm {} \;"))