Can Selenium interact with an existing browser session?

Question

Does anybody know if Selenium (WebDriver preferably) is able to communicate with and act through a browser that is already running before launching a Selenium Client?

Answer 1

This is pretty easy using the JavaScript selenium-webdriver client:

First, make sure you have a WebDriver server running. For example, download ChromeDriver, then run chromedriver --port=9515.

Second, create the driver like this:

var driver = new webdriver.Builder()
   .withCapabilities(webdriver.Capabilities.chrome())
   .usingServer('http://localhost:9515')  // <- this
   .build();

Here's a complete example:

var webdriver = require('selenium-webdriver');

var driver = new webdriver.Builder()
   .withCapabilities(webdriver.Capabilities.chrome())
   .usingServer('http://localhost:9515')
   .build();

driver.get('http://www.google.com');
driver.findElement(webdriver.By.name('q')).sendKeys('webdriver');
driver.findElement(webdriver.By.name('btnG')).click();
driver.getTitle().then(function(title) {
   console.log(title);
 });

driver.quit();