Today, while hunting down a nasty issue in a longer Selenium/Cukes scenario outline, I was flooded with a particular annoying warning:
WARNING:
org.openqa.selenium.manager.SeleniumManagerlambda$runCommand$1
Problem reading geckodriver versions: error sending request for
url (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/trunk/common/geckodriver/geckodriversupport.json).
Using latest geckodriver version
org.openga.selenium.manager.SeleniumManagerlambda$runCommand$1
WARNING: Exception managing firefox: error sending request for
url (https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases/latest)
You too? Then you are at the right place.
The reason
Selenium is trying to check for an update for your geckodriver executable. What is planned as a nice convenience feature can be quite an annoyance in a restricted environment. When Selenium is executed within such an environment, it cannot contact the remote geckodriver version dictionary and nags us with „Problem reading geckodriver versions: error sending request for url …“.
Thankfully the Selenium team seems to be aware of that and provided us with a simple fix. Sadly that fix is quite non-explicit but that’s not going to stop us anytime soon.
Fixing the „Problem reading geckodriver versions: error sending request for url“ warning
The update check happens if – and only if – Selenium derives the geckodriver path from Seleniums automatic lookup feature (i.e. when it checks the system PATH variable). Therefore all we have to do is setting the geckodriver path explicitly. In Java we do that like this:
System.setProperty(“webdriver.gecko.driver”, “/path/to/your/geckodriver”);
By setting that Java system property we tell Selenium explicitly what geckodriver to use and we prevent it from doing any additional shenanigans on the driver binary thus silencing the warning. Using an appropriate if-clause you can tailor it to any kind of environment. You have full internet access? Cool! Then your system geckodriver might be perfectly sufficient. It’s all in your hands.
Final thoughts
Alright! This should relieve you from that „Problem reading geckodriver versions: error sending request for url“ warning. When working with complex Selenium Webdriver tests, it is overall nice that the framework logs so verbose and provides us with all these features. But sometimes it can be a little full of itself. The good thing is though that there usually is a way to customise Selenium’s behavior to our personal needs, whether it is working in a restricted network area or with full access to the internet – Selenium knows it all.
Though sometimes it has its difficulties to articulate itself – just as we humans do. Anyways, thank you for reading. If you are still curious about what’s possible with Java in QA, here’s an interesting post about fuzzing in Java. If you don’t particularly care about Java but you would like to see more test automation action in general, I’d recommend trying Cucumber in Rust.
Have a great day!
