POSTS / A Simpler Way to Install Chrome Browser and Chromedriver on WSL2 (Ubuntu 22.04)

Installing Google Chrome

As I have searched and seen so many posts instructing users to install a google chrome by local installation methods like dpkg or rpm, I’d prefer install via a very simple command:

$ sudo apt install google-chrome-stable

Installing ChromeDriver

Here I used a very traditional method to install a chrome driver.

First, I went to https://googlechromelabs.github.io/chrome-for-testing/#stable to find a proper version of chrome driver and then downloaded it into WSL2.

$ wget https://storage.googleapis.com/chrome-for-testing-public/123.0.6312.122/linux64/chromedriver-linux64.zip

Second, extract the downloaded ZIP file and move the executable file into somewhere (here I chose ~/.local/bin).

$ unzip chromedriver-linux64.zip
$ mv chromedriver-linux64/chromedriver ~/.local/bin/chromedriver

Finally, check the permissions and whether ~/.local/bin is in system path.

$ chmod +x ~/.local/bin/chromedriver
$ export PATH="$PATH:~/.local/bin"

Verify Google Chrome and ChromeDriver

Run the following commands and see whether they can work well.

$ google-chrome --version
$ chromedriver --version

Another Way to Install WebDrivers

As Selenium guide says, there have already been several driver management libraries:

• WebDriverManager (Java)
• WebDriver Manager (Python)
• WebDriver Manager Package (.NET)
• webdrivers gem (Ruby)

Maybe that’s a more elegant way to install a web driver. 🙂