Unable to Locate Driver Error

Historically, this is the most common error beginning Selenium users get when trying to run code for the first time:

• Java
• Python
• CSharp
• Ruby

Likely cause

Through WebDriver, Selenium supports all major browsers. In order to drive the requested browser, Selenium needs to send commands to it via an executable driver. This error means the necessary driver could not be found by any of the means Selenium attempts to use.

Possible solutions

There are several ways to ensure Selenium gets the driver it needs.

Use the latest version of Selenium

As of Selenium 4.6, Selenium downloads the correct driver for you. You shouldn’t need to do anything. If you are using the latest version of Selenium and you are getting an error, please turn on logging and file a bug report with that information.

If you want to read more information about how Selenium manages driver downloads for you, you can read about the Selenium Manager.

Use the PATH environment variable

This option first requires manually downloading the driver.

This is a flexible option to change location of drivers without having to update your code, and will work on multiple machines without requiring that each machine put the drivers in the same place.

You can either place the drivers in a directory that is already listed in PATH, or you can place them in a directory and add it to PATH.

• Bash
• Zsh
• Windows

echo $PATH

echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/driver' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

chromedriver --version

echo $PATH

echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/driver' >> ~/.zshenv
source ~/.zshenv

chromedriver --version

echo %PATH%

setx PATH "%PATH%;C:\WebDriver\bin"

chromedriver.exe --version

Specify the location of the driver

If you cannot upgrade to the latest version of Selenium, you do not want Selenium to download drivers for you, and you can’t figure out the environment variables, you can specify the location of the driver in the Service object.

You first need to download the desired driver, then create an instance of the applicable Service class and set the path.

Specifying the location in the code itself has the advantage of not needing to figure out Environment Variables on your system, but has the drawback of making the code less flexible.

Driver management libraries

Before Selenium managed drivers itself, other projects were created to do so for you.

If you can’t use Selenium Manager because you are using an older version of Selenium (please upgrade), or need an advanced feature not yet implemented by Selenium Manager, you might try one of these tools to keep your drivers automatically updated:

• WebDriverManager (Java)
• WebDriver Manager (Python)
• WebDriver Manager Package (.NET)
• webdrivers gem (Ruby)

Download the driver

Note: The Opera driver no longer works with the latest functionality of Selenium and is currently officially unsupported.