Getting Started

System Requirements

There are four primary requirements to use the Chromium driver:

• macOS, Windows or Linux host machine
• Appium
• Chromium-based desktop web browser
• chromedriver or msedgedriver binary accessible from the host machine PATH
  • Since Chromium driver version 2.2.0, the driver will automatically download a compatible binary when starting a new session. This can be changed using the appium:autodownloadEnabled capability.
  • For chromedriver, since Chromium driver version 1.4.0, you can also use the install-chromedriver driver script to download and set up the binary in advance. Manual chromedriver downloads can also be found here.
  • For msedgedriver, refer to the Microsoft Edge guide.

Appium Server

Make sure to install a version of Appium that supports your target driver version. The requirements and prerequisites of Appium itself can be found in the Appium documentation.

Chromium driver version	Supported Appium server version
>= 2.0.0	Appium 3
1.0.0 - 1.5.1	Appium 2

Installation

Provided you have set up the above prerequisites, you can install the driver using Appium's extension CLI:

appium driver install chromium

You can also specify an exact driver version:

appium driver install chromium@2.2.0

Alternatively, if you are running a Node.js project, you can include appium-chromium-driver as one of your project dependencies. Refer to the Appium documentation for more information about this approach.

Verify the Installation

In order to check that the driver was installed correctly, simply launch the Appium server:

appium

The server log output should include a line like the following:

[Appium] ChromiumDriver has been successfully loaded in 0.789s

Creating a Session

The Chromium driver, like all Appium drivers, requires providing specific capabilities in order to start a new session. The following example lists the minimum required capabilities for a basic session:

// This will launch Chrome on the host machine and attach to it
{
  ...
  "platformName": "mac", // "mac", "windows", or "linux"
  "appium:automationName": "chromium",
  ...
}

In controlled environments, to ensure that the correct browser is launched, it is recommended to also set the goog:chromeOptions.binary / ms:edgeOptions.binary capability. See the Capabilities reference page for more information on these and other capabilities supported by the driver.