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Automation Protocols

With WebdriverIO, you can choose between multiple automation technologies when running your E2E tests locally or in the cloud. By default, WebdriverIO will attempt to start a local automation session using the WebDriver Bidi protocol.

WebDriver Bidi Protocol​

The WebDriver Bidi is an automation protocol to automate browsers using bi-directional communication. It's the successor of the WebDriver protocol and enables a lot more introspection capabilities for various testing use cases.

This protocol is currently under development and new primitives might be added in the future. All browser vendors have committed to implementing this web standard and a lot of primitives have already been landed in browsers.

WebDriver Protocol​

WebDriver is a remote control interface that enables introspection and control of user agents. It provides a platform- and language-neutral wire protocol as a way for out-of-process programs to remotely instruct the behavior of web browsers.

The WebDriver protocol was designed to automate a browser from the user perspective, meaning that everything a user is able to do, you can do with the browser. It provides a set of commands that abstract away common interactions with an application (e.g., navigating, clicking, or reading the state of an element). Since it is a web standard, it is well supported across all major browser vendors and also is being used as an underlying protocol for mobile automation using Appium.

To use this automation protocol, you need a proxy server that translates all commands and executes them in the target environment (i.e. the browser or the mobile app).

For browser automation, the proxy server is usually the browser driver. There are drivers available for all browsers:

For any kind of mobile automation, you’ll need to install and setup Appium. It will allow you to automate mobile (iOS/Android) or even desktop (macOS/Windows) applications using the same WebdriverIO setup.

There are also plenty of services that allow you to run your automation test in the cloud at high scale. Instead of having to setup all these drivers locally, you can just talk to these services (e.g. Sauce Labs) in the cloud and inspect the results on their platform. The communication between test script and automation environment will look as follows:

WebDriver Setup

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