Manual WebDriver Setup

This appendix covers running the webdriver yourself instead of letting thirtyfour manage it for you. Common reasons:

• You’re connecting to a remote Selenium grid or a driver running in a container.
• You want a long-lived driver process you can reuse across many runs of your program.
• You’ve disabled the manager Cargo feature to slim your build.

In any of these cases you’ll need to download a webdriver binary, start it on a known port, and pass that URL to WebDriver::new(...).

Downloading A WebDriver Binary

Pick the binary that matches your browser:

• For Chrome, download chromedriver
• For Firefox, download geckodriver
• For Microsoft Edge, download msedgedriver
• For Safari (macOS), safaridriver ships with the OS — run safaridriver --enable once to allow remote automation.

The webdriver may be zipped. Unzip it and place the binary somewhere in your PATH. Make sure it is executable and that you have permission to run it.

Make sure the webdriver version matches the version of the browser you have installed. If they don’t match, the driver returns an error when you try to start a session. Browser auto-updates are a common cause of drift here.

Starting The WebDriver

Open a terminal and run the binary directly:

chromedriver        # listens on port 9515 by default
geckodriver         # listens on port 4444 by default
msedgedriver        # listens on port 9515 by default

Leave it running in that terminal — it’s the server that thirtyfour will talk to.

Connecting From Your Code

Pass the driver’s URL to WebDriver::new(...):

use thirtyfour::prelude::*;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> WebDriverResult<()> {
    let caps = DesiredCapabilities::chrome();
    let driver = WebDriver::new("http://localhost:9515", caps).await?;
    driver.goto("https://www.rust-lang.org/").await?;
    driver.quit().await?;
    Ok(())
}

For Firefox, use DesiredCapabilities::firefox() and the geckodriver URL (http://localhost:4444).