Using Selenium with NodeJS and the Brave browser (on MacOS Big Sur)

Question

I'm trying to run some simple tests on a NodeJS app, using Selenium and the Brave browser.

I'm running Big Sur (11.5.2), using Brave version:

Version 1.28.105 Chromium: 92.0.4515.131 (Official Build) (x86_64)

I've downloaded the ChromeDriver, and I've installed in my path:

> which chromedriver
/Users/dd/bin/scripts/chromedriver

> chromedriver --version
ChromeDriver 92.0.4515.107 (87a818b10553a07434ea9e2b6dccf3cbe7895134-refs/branch-heads/4515@{#1634})

I've created a folder, yarn inited, added the selenium-webdriver as a dev dependency,

{
  "name": "seleniumtest",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "seleniumtest",
  "main": "index.js",
  "license": "MIT",
  "dependencies": {
    "cors": "^2.8.5",
    "express": "^4.17.1"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "eslint": "^7.32.0",
    "jest": "^27.0.6",
    "nodemon": "^2.0.12",
    "selenium-webdriver": "^4.0.0-beta.4"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node ./index.js"
  }
}

run up the following Javascript file, index.js:

const { Builder, By, Key, until } = require('selenium-webdriver');

(async function example() {
  let driver = await new Builder().forBrowser('brave').build();
  try {
    await driver.get('http://www.google.com/');
    await driver.findElement(By.name('q')).sendKeys('webdriver', Key.RETURN);
    await driver.wait(until.titleIs('webdriver - Google Search'), 1000);
  } finally {
    await driver.quit();
  }
})();

I've fired up the chromedriver:

> chromedriver          
Starting ChromeDriver 92.0.4515.107 (87a818b10553a07434ea9e2b6dccf3cbe7895134-refs/branch-heads/4515@{#1634}) on port 9515
Only local connections are allowed.
Please see https://chromedriver.chromium.org/security-considerations for suggestions on keeping ChromeDriver safe.
ChromeDriver was started successfully.

but when I run yarn start I get :

UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Error: Do not know how to build driver: browser; did you forget to call usingServer(url)?

If I replace Builder().forBrowser('brave').build(); with Builder().forBrowser('chrome').build(); then Chrome fires up, but the window just sits there trying to load data:, in the url bar. I tried chromium - same result as for brave.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You can use setChromeBinaryPath function and point the brave binary path to it:

const chrome = require('selenium-webdriver/chrome');    
(async function helloSelenium(){
    let options = await new chrome.Options();
    options.setChromeBinaryPath('/opt/brave.com/brave/brave-browser');

in the forBrowser('brave') replace it with 'chrome', as selenium will do a switch case with that and only the values in Browser enum will be valid (chrome, edge, firefox, internet_explorer, safari, opera);