ChromeDriver console application hide

Question

I have created a player which will automate chrome using selenium and ChromeDriver in C#. It's working fine.

Issue what I am facing is, when it creates an object for ChromDriver, it will start ChromeDriver application, which gets pop up and then Chrome will load. It's perfect as that application is loading that chrome for me.

Is there anyway, that I can open that ChromeDriver hidden?

Answer 1

No, there is no way to hide the console window of the chromedriver.exe in the .NET bindings without modifying the bindings source code. This is seen as a feature of the bindings, as it makes it very easy to see when your code hasn't correctly cleaned up the resources of the ChromeDriver, since the console window remains open. In the case of some other languages, if your code does not properly clean up the instance of ChromeDriver by calling the quit() method on the WebDriver object, you can end up with a zombie chromedriver.exe process running on your machine.

Answer 2

Modifying source code in WebDriver\DriverService.cs is not necessary for this in latest WebDriver. You just need to instantiate ChromeDriverService and set HideCommandPromptWindow to true and then instantiate ChromeDriver by that service and ChromeOptions. I am giving C# code example below

var chromeDriverService = ChromeDriverService.CreateDefaultService();
chromeDriverService.HideCommandPromptWindow = true;
return new ChromeDriver(chromeDriverService,  new ChromeOptions());