Selenium - OpenQA.Selenium.DriverServiceNotFoundException

With the announcement from Microsoft to stop supporting Coded UI tests, I’m back in Selenium land.

To get it back in my fingers, I started to write a first simple Selenium test:

But although this test looked quite simple, it failed with the following exception:

Test Name:        TestMethod1

Test FullName:  SeleniumTestProject.UnitTest1.TestMethod1

Test Source:       C:\projects\test\SeleniumTestProject\UnitTest1.cs : line 10

Test Outcome:  Failed

Test Duration:   0:00:00,2912324

Result StackTrace:         

at OpenQA.Selenium.DriverService.FindDriverServiceExecutable(String executableName, Uri downloadUrl)

   at OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome.ChromeDriverService.CreateDefaultService()

   at OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome.ChromeDriver..ctor(ChromeOptions options)

   at SeleniumTestProject.UnitTest1.TestMethod1() in C:\projects\test\SeleniumTestProject\UnitTest1.cs:line 15

Result Message:             

Test method SeleniumTestProject.UnitTest1.TestMethod1 threw exception:

OpenQA.Selenium.DriverServiceNotFoundException: The chromedriver.exe file does not exist in the current directory or in a directory on the PATH environment variable. The driver can be downloaded at http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html.

The exception was easy to understand, I needed the chromedriver.exe to spin up a chrome instance. I could follow the suggestions in the exception and download it from http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html. A simpler alternative is adding the Selenium.Chrome.WebDriver NuGet package to your project.

This package does all the work for you: tt installs Chrome Driver(Win32) for Selenium WebDriver into your Unit Test Project and copies the "chromedriver.exe" to the bin folder when building your project.