Adding Selenium to Your Project

Adding Selenium to Your Project

With Java and Maven installed, adding Selenium is a single pom.xml change — but the dependency choices you make now affect your project's long-term maintainability.

The pom.xml Dependencies

<dependencies>
  <!-- Selenium WebDriver -->
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
    <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
    <version>4.20.0</version>
  </dependency>

  <!-- TestNG test framework -->
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.testng</groupId>
    <artifactId>testng</artifactId>
    <version>7.10.2</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
  </dependency>

  <!-- WebDriverManager — handles browser driver binaries automatically -->
  <dependency>
    <groupId>io.github.bonigarcia</groupId>
    <artifactId>webdrivermanager</artifactId>
    <version>5.8.0</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

WebDriverManager: No More Manual Driver Downloads

Before Selenium 4.6, you had to manually download ChromeDriver and keep it in sync with your Chrome version. WebDriverManager automates this:

WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup();
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

Selenium 4.6+ includes Selenium Manager which does this automatically — you may not even need WebDriverManager. But it is useful for older setups and customisation.

Your First Driver Instance

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions;

public class DriverFactory {
    public static WebDriver createChromeDriver() {
        ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
        options.addArguments("--headless=new");  // remove for debugging
        options.addArguments("--window-size=1920,1080");
        return new ChromeDriver(options);
    }
}

Always run headless in CI. Run headed (remove --headless) when debugging locally.

Always Quit the Driver

WebDriver driver = DriverFactory.createChromeDriver();
try {
    driver.get("https://example.com");
    // ... test code
} finally {
    driver.quit(); // closes browser AND kills the driver process
}

driver.quit() is different from driver.close():

• close(): closes the current browser window only
• quit(): closes all windows and terminates the WebDriver session (no memory leak)

Always use quit() in a finally block or @AfterMethod to ensure cleanup even when tests fail.