How to identify chromedriver.exe?

Question

I have some RPA processes which use ChromeDriver to connect to specific instances of Chrome identified by its remote-debugging-port and a custom command arument for chrome which idenitifies the specific chrome instances as "from my program".

I have a program using Selenium ChromeDriver. I do not let ChromeDriver create the Chrome Instance, but rahter re-use an existing one. So when my program starts up it can find the specific Chrome I want to use, and connect a new ChromeDriver to it. The issue is that sometimes the ChromeDriver is left running stuck because I exited without Quitting it (this is development work - stuff happens!)

I would like to be able to somehow tag the ChromeDriver that was launched by my programs. Iti is easy to tage the Chrome instance - I just pass in any unique argument and it happily accepts it, as in "--originator=me", then I can go through the chrome processes, get their command line and know which Chrome is mine. But I do not know how to do this with ChromeDriver. Here are ideas I have that have not worked:

1. Pass in a command line argument to chromedriver, but the only argument I see in the process is "port=12345"

2. Get the Process ID of the chromedriver I just created. But I do not know how to ask the new driver for this, even though I have access to it.

Any ideas on how to identify a chromedriver that my process created, assuming that later on my program will be looking for this specific instance?

Answer 1

You can use a ChromeDriverService to create a ChromeDriver then give the service a LogPath. That LogPathcan be the identifier as long as it's a valid file name. Just like this:

var svc = ChromeDriverService.CreateDefaultService();
svc.LogPath = LogPath
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
driver = new ChromeDriver(svc, options);

Then if you want to find the specific ChromeDriver, just find the windows process with this command-line argument. In this case we really don't care about the contents of that file itself, just the fact that the magic word is now programmatically discoverable.