Here is how to use Chromedriver without libraries like selenium-webdriver. This can be useful for debugging.
The following example visits a web page and reads the a headline's text contents.
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Create a session:
curl -XPOST http://localhost:9515/session -d '{"desiredCapabilities":{"browserName":"chrome"}}'You will get a JSON response containing lots of information about your Chrome session, including a
sessionId. Use this to send any future commands to your chromedriver session.{"sessionId":"your-session-id-here","status":0,"value":{...}}You might want to pass options as into the
chromeOptionscapabilities e.g.--headless:'{"desiredCapabilities":{"browserName":"chrome", "chromeOptions":{"args":["--headless"]}}}' -
Visit a URL like this:
curl http://localhost:9515/session/your-session-id-here/url -d '{"url":"http://example.com/"}'{"sessionId":"...","status":0,"value":null} -
Finding elements is fairly simple:
curl http://localhost:9515/session/your-session-id-here/element -d '{"using":"tagName","value":"h1"}'{"sessionId":"...","status":0,"value":{"ELEMENT":"element-object-id-here"}} -
Read the element's text content by using the element's identifier received above:
curl http://localhost:9515/session/your-session-id-here/element/element-object-id-here/text{"sessionId":"...","status":0,"value":"Example Domain"} -
To close Chrome, terminate your session:
curl -XDELETE http://localhost:9515/session/your-session-id-here{"sessionId":"...","status":0,"value":null}
Chromedriver follows the W3C WebDriver spec. There are tons of things you can do with it, but performing more advanced tasks without a tool like selenium-webdriver can be quite difficult.
However, for simple debugging or remote-controlling, curl might be an adequate option.
