How to install Chromedriver for Mac OS X / Selenium / Python

Selenium is great for automated testing of web-apps and I’ve been using the Selenium IDE Firefox extension for a few months now.

For completeness of automated testing for web apps you need to do this in a number of different browsers which Selenium IDE doesn’t do. So you’ll need to download and install Selenium on your Mac.

June 2020 - this article is out of date - checkout my updated post on Automated Testing

Download Chromedriver to your Mac

Head over to the Chromedriver Project page and download the latest package.

You then need to unzip the package and then copy the file to /usr/bin

This is a hidden system folder so the easy way to get to this file is

1. Open another finder window
2. From the Go menu select Go To Folder
3. Type /usr/bin and press enter

Now drag n drop the Chromedriver file from your Download folder to this directory. You’ll be prompted for you Admin password.

Finally, I suggest you restart your computer  as the next step didn’t work when I tried it.

Basic Test Case for Chromedriver and Selenium

If you’ve already followed my guide to setup Selenium via Python then this will look familiar

Open a terminal window and type the following, pressing enter at the end of each line

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python
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

After a few seconds, if all is well a new instance of Chrome will open

To finish the test just type

driver.get("http://www.damien.co")

To exit Python from your open Terminal, press ctrl+z

Meet the author

Damien Saunders
An experienced management consultant and business leader interested in digital transformation, product centred design and scaled agile. If I'm not writing about living with UCTD (an autoimmune disease), I'm probably listening to music, reading a book or learning more about wine.
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