How to auto-refresh the ChromeDriver using Selenium Webdriver

Question

I have been using Chrome auto refresh plugin in the beginning. However, now my code has multiple ChromeDriver instances opening and closing and I cannot use an auto refresh. Also, it is quite a fuss to install an auto-refresh on new computers.

Is there any way to refresh the driver (simulate F5 say every 10 seconds if the driver does not change remains motionless) with Selenium similar to the auto refresh done by Google?

Answer 1

You can use this command. Also, refresh is a built-in command.

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("http://www.google.com")
driver.refresh()

Put the binary in the same folder as the python script you're writing and add the path of the browser driver

If you want to refresh every 5 seconds or more, just surround the refresh line with a while loop and add a delay. For example:

import time
while(True):
    driver.refresh()
    time.sleep(refresh_time_in_seconds)

If you wish to just refresh the page and you can see that the page hasn't changed, keep track of the page that you're on. driver.current_url is the URL of the current page. So putting it all together it would be:

import time
refresh_time_in_seconds = 15
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("http://www.google.com")
url = driver.current_url
while(True):
    if url == driver.current_url:
        driver.refresh()
    url = driver.current_url
    time.sleep(refresh_time_in_seconds)

Another way to do this is by using this command

driver.get("some website url"); driver.navigate().refresh();

We can use actions class and mimic the key press F5

Actions act = new Actions(driver); act.SendKeys(Keys.F5).perform();

Hope this helps