How to find out which WebDriver version is installed on an Azure DevOps build machine using YAML?

This post was most recently updated on March 28th, 2023.

2 min read.

Uh, okay, well. So this is where you should just RTFM (that’s along the lines of “check the documentation” for those uninitiated in the world of unnecessary abbreviations). But as we’ve found out before, Microsoft’s documentation on the agent’s installed software isn’t always up-to-date. That’s why I added this simple snippet on my pipeline to figure out which version of the browser AND the webdriver are installed on the machine.

The snippets below can be combined with logic to install different versions of Chrome and the WebDriver, if need be. And of course, while I’m using Chrome, you could use Firefox and the GeckoWebDriver instead – it’s just a matter of changing the respective apps in the snippets!

Solution

Well, this turned out to be fairly simple. For our convenience, let’s echo both the VersionInfo of the browser executable and the version output of the WebDriver!

The following YAML will output the Chrome and Chrome WebDriver versions nicely in your build log.

- powershell: |
   (Get-Item "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe").VersionInfo 
  displayName: 'We want to know the Chrome version installed on this darned machine'

- pwsh: |
    chromeDriver -v
  displayName: Echo Chrome WebDriver version

If you get an error, something like below:

chromeDriver : The term 'chromeDriver' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable
program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

Then see this post on how to configure your pipeline to use the WebDriver that’s installed on the build agent already:

How to use the right version of the WebDriver on hosted agents in Azure DevOps?

And that’s about it. If you run into any issues, let me know in the comments section below!

Author

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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Speaker / Consultant at Koskila / Precio Fishbone / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as Solutions Architect for Precio Fishbone, building delightful Digital Workplaces.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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