WebDriver playback in Selenium IDE requires the Standalone Selenium Server. The Standalone Selenium Server in turn requires a few supporting pieces of software. I have decided to break the whole process into individual parts to make it easier on the eyes. So onwards to the third step of getting the Internet Explorer Driver Server.

Getting the Internet Explorer Driver Server

This post deals with installing the Internet Explorer Driver Server. The Internet Explorer Driver Server or IEDriverServer was introduced as a result of an improvement in the architecture of the Internet Explorer driver. Earlier, the Standalone Selenium Server was sufficient to run tests on Internet Explorer. Now, one extra step of downloading the IEDriverServer is required if you want to run tests using WebDriver on Internet Explorer, but benefits are well worth the extra step. You only need the IEDriverServer if you are planning to run tests using Internet Explorer on Windows.

Download the zip file from Selenium downloads page

There are two flavours of the IEDriverServer, viz., 32-bit and 64-bit. The one you need depends on the edition of Internet Explorer you are planning to use. Note that it is not the Operating System type. A 64-bit Windows version can have 32-bit Internet Explorer or 64-bit Internet Explorer or even both. If you do not know or do not care, I would recommend getting the 32-bit version.

Go to the Selenium download page and download the file that starts with IEDriverServer. The 32-bit version has Win32 as part of the name and the 64-bit version has x64. As of writing it is IEDriverServer_Win32_2.28.0.zip for the 32-bit version and IEDriverServer_x64_2.28.0.zip for the 64-bit version. Get one or both based on what you need. I would recommend that you save the zip files in the same folder that you used to save the Standalone Selenium Server. The zip file contains the actual driver named IEDriverServer.exe. Since the name of driver in the zip file is the same for both the IEDriverServer, I would recommend that you extract and rename it immediately. For the 32-bit version, extract the IEDriverServer.exe from the IEDriverServer_Win32_2.28.0.zip file and rename it to IEDriverServer32.exe. Similarly for the 64-bit version, extract the IEDriverServer.exe from the IEDriverServer_x64_2.28.0.zip file and rename it to IEDriverServer64.exe. Once you have the extracted driver file, you can delete the original zip file.

It is a good thing to periodically get the latest version as it contains support for the latest versions of browsers.

Passing the right IEDriverServer to the Selenium Server

The IEDriverServer is used directly by the Standalone Selenium Server, so you need to have Standalone Selenium Server installed. If you have not done it yet, check my earlier post. You can pass the location and name of the IEDriverServer to Standalone Selenium Server when you start it. Open a command prompt or terminal window and change to the folder where you have downloaded the IEDriverServer and the selenium-server-standalone jar file. Then start the selenium server with the following command on a single line.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.28.0.jar
 -Dwebdriver.ie.driver=.\IEDriverServer32.exe

The selenium-server-standalone-2.28.0.jar should be changed to the name of the jar file you have downloaded and the IEDriverServer32.exe to the one you are using. If all went well you should see a bunch of messages including one like the following.

Setting system property webdriver.ie.driver to .\IEDriverServer32.exe

If you see this message, you can shut down the server by pressing ctrl+c on Windows or closing the command window.

You should now be ready to go to the next step and actually start running tests using WebDriver playback from Selenium IDE.