wdman

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Introduction

wdman (Webdriver Manager) is an R package that allows the user to manage the downloading/running of third party binaries relating to the webdriver/selenium projects. The package was inspired by a similar node package webdriver-manager.

The checking/downloading of binaries is handled by the binman package, and the running of the binaries as processes is handled by the subprocess package.

The wdman package currently manages the following binaries:

• Selenium standalone binary
• chromedriver
• PhantomJS binary
• geckodriver
• iedriver

Associated with the above are five functions to download/manage the binaries:

• selenium(...)
• chrome(...)
• phantomjs(...)
• gecko(...)
• iedriver(...)

Installation

You can install wdman from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("ropensci/wdman")

The package can also be installed from CRAN:

install.packages("wdman")

Example

As an example, we show how one would run the Selenium standalone binary as a process:

Running the Selenium binary

The binary takes a port argument which defaults to port = 4567L. There are a number of optional arguments to use a particular version of the binaries related to browsers selenium may control. By default, the selenium function will look to use the latest version of each.

selServ <- selenium(verbose = FALSE)
selServ$process

## PROCESS 'file50e6163b37b8.sh', running, pid 21289.

The selenium function returns a list of functions and a handle representing the running process.

The returned output, error and log functions give access to the stdout/stderr pipes and the cumulative stdout/stderr messages respectively.

selServ$log()

## $stderr
## [1] "13:25:51.744 INFO [GridLauncherV3.parse] - Selenium server version: 4.0.0-alpha-2, revision: f148142cf8"         
## [2] "13:25:52.174 INFO [GridLauncherV3.lambda$buildLaunchers$3] - Launching a standalone Selenium Server on port 4567"
## [3] "13:25:54.018 INFO [WebDriverServlet.<init>] - Initialising WebDriverServlet"                                     
## [4] "13:25:54.539 INFO [SeleniumServer.boot] - Selenium Server is up and running on port 4567"                        

## $stdout
## character(0)

The stop function sends a signal that terminates the process:

selServ$stop()

## TRUE

Available browsers

By default, the selenium function includes paths to chromedriver/geckodriver/phantomjs so that the Chrome/Firefox and PhantomJS browsers are available respectively. All versions (chromever, geckover etc) are given as "latest". If the user passes a value of NULL for any driver, it will be excluded.

On Windows operating systems, the option to included the Internet Explorer driver is also given. This is set to iedrver = NULL so not ran by default. Set it to iedrver = "latest" or a specific version string to include it on your Windows.

Further details

For further details, please see the package vignette.