Dropping of chromedriver NPM package

Hello everyone,

There is currently an open PR that removes chromedriver as an optional dependency from package.json. The reason for this is that we don’t actually need it in Javascript testing and keeping it in sync is an absolute pain. It’s actually not needed at all because in our CI we install Chromedriver via system packages that are in sync with Chromium. This cuts down on every single CI run but also on the overhead of keeping it in sync.

After this is merged you, the developer, are required to have chromedriver in $PATH. On Fedora I’d recommend using dnf install chromedriver. On other platforms it might be needed to download it from Downloads - ChromeDriver - WebDriver for Chrome. It still looks in node_modules so manually installing the NPM package might also still work.

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Thanks for the info for the developers. Could you please copy the text also to developer handbook? I believe this will be handy in future.

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Why would developers need to install it if we don’t need it at all?

This was perhaps worded a bit vague, but the Javascript test suite written in Javascript doesn’t do any browser based testing. It’s in the Ruby test suite where we have those complete end to end tests with a browser.