Install Selenium + NodeJS + geckodriver (Firefox) on MacOS

Sabtu, 11 November 2023, 4:45 pm0

Previously I used Selenium in NodeJS environment with Chrome #browser, but because of Google updated Chrome regularly, its webdriver wasn’t updated quickly enough.

I couldn’t figure out how to disable Chrome auto update, and an outdated webdriver doesn’t work with new version of Chrome. So I decided to switch to using Firefox and its webdriver, named geckodriver.

Pre-requisite:

• Firefox browser – https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/download/thanks/
• NodeJS & npm – brew install node

Install geckodriver:

• Download compiled binary from https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases/, latest version as of November 2023 – geckodriver-v0.33.0-macos.tar.gz
• Untar it & move geckodriver to /usr/local/bin/
• Or, can put it in any folder & add that folder to $PATH environment variable:
  • I put it in ~/Documents/geckodriver/ folder
  • Edit ~/.zshrc, add export PATH=$PATH:~/Documents/geckodriver
  • run source ~/.zshrc in terminal to update the environment variable values

Try run geckodriver, if it’s showing dialog similar like below, this one is when I try to run chromedriver:

To solve this, go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Allow apps downloaded from, click Allow Anyway.

Create NodeJS app & using selenium-webdriver node module:

mkdir myapp
cd myapp
npm init -y
npm install selenium-webdriver

To test the installation, create test.js insider myapp folder, and copy the source code from this gist:

• open one tab in Terminal, and run geckodriver
• In another tab, run test.js: node test.js

#webdev