Open ChromeDriver in Java selenium without knowing it's file path

Question

Basically what I would like to do is to open ChromeDriver wherever it is on a users desktop without knowing the full path for reasons like not knowing the full path or the location of ChromeDriver is changed at some point in time. I am new to this so I really don't know much when it comes to this sort of problem.

Basically my current code looks like this:

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Users\\abcde\\Desktop\\selenium\\Chromedriver.exe");

What I'm wondering if there is a way to open ChromeDriver without specifying the full path so it looks something like this:

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "...\\Chromedriver.exe");```

I know this isn't a correct way to write it I'm just giving a example of how I'm thinking it would look and this line came to mine since in html I used ../css when I wanted to specify the path to my CSS file.

If you had a chrome driver instance stored in your project folder you could reference it with a relative path like so — Andrew Biddle, Mar 30 '22 at 19:32

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 30 '22 at 21:15

Incase of a multiuser project where you are not sure about the location of the absolute location of the ChromeDriver an ideal approach would be to create a Properties object and initialize it from myProperties.txt as follows:

Contents of myProperties.txt:

webdriver.chrome.driver=C:\\BrowserDrivers\\chromedriver.exe

Now you can write a class PropertiesTest then use System.setProperties() to install the new Properties objects as the current set of system properties.

import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.util.Properties;

public class PropertiesTest {
    public static void main(String[] args)
    throws Exception {

    // set up new properties object
    // from file "myProperties.txt"
    FileInputStream propFile =
        new FileInputStream( "myProperties.txt");
    Properties p =
        new Properties(System.getProperties());
    p.load(propFile);

    // set the system properties
    System.setProperties(p);
    // display new properties
    System.getProperties().list(System.out);
    }
}

Open ChromeDriver in Java selenium without knowing it's file path

1 Answers1