OperaDriver is a vendor-supported WebDriver implementation developed by Opera and volunteers that enable programmatic automation of different Opera products. It is a part of the Selenium project.

WebDriver is a general purpose library for automating web browsers. It can drive the browser running various tests on your web pages, just as if a real user was navigating through them. It can emulate actions like clicking links, enter text and submitting forms, and reporting results back to you so you know that your website works as intended.

OperaDriver's end-user emulation ensures that your entire stack (HTML, scripts, styling, embedded resources and backend setup) is functioning correctly without tedious manual testing routines.

OperaDriver is usable out of the box from the official Selenium packages, and can be used no extra setup on any modern version of Opera.

• API documentation
• Selenium WebDriver documentation
• Java examples
• Python bindings API
• Ruby bindings API
• Complete list of capabilities

To get set up, first download either the selenium-server-standalone or selenium-server package and make sure you have a fairly recent version of Opera installed in a default location. Finally, all you need to do is create a new OperaDriver instance:

WebDriver driver = new OperaDriver();
driver.get("http://opera.com/");

If you prefer using a package management system, OperaDriver is also available through Maven; either as a part of the Selenium package, or as a separate package. The group ID for Selenium is org.openqa.selenium.*, and com.opera and artifact ID operadriver for OperaDriver specifically.

Since WebDriver provides bindings for several programming languages, you can follow the same approach as above in both Python (using the selenium package) and in Ruby (using the selenium-webdriver gem).

The Python equivalent of the above example would be:

from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Opera()
driver.get('http://opera.com/')

The same in Ruby:

require 'selenium-webdriver'
driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :opera
driver.get('http://opera.com/')

To execute the tests, please ensure that the environmental variable SELENIUM_SERVER_JAR contains the path to the selenium-server-standalone JAR you downloaded earlier.

To execute the Python test:

SELENIUM_SERVER_JAR=/path/to/selenium-server-standalone.jar python test.py

And for Ruby:

SELENIUM_SERVER_JAR=/path/to/selenium-server-standalone.jar ruby test.rb

OperaDriver is fully compatible with the RemoteWebDriver client. This allows you to run tests on a remote computer which is typically very useful in a distributed environment. First, ensure that your Selenium server is running, then create a remote client as usual:

WebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver("http://localhost:4444", DesiredCapabilities.opera());
driver.get("http://opera.com/");

To customize Opera and WebDriver in various ways you may request a certain configuration from the Selenium server. Since not all server implementations supports every WebDriver feature, the client and server should use JSON objects with the properties when describing which features are desirable.

In additon to the general WebDriver capabilities available, OperaDriver has a number of custom capabilities that may be requested. To request a specific driver configuration you

You can use the DesiredCapabilities class to request a specific driver configuration. The Opera-specific capabilities supported are:

OperaDriver also supports some of the common desired capabilities too:

• proxy

For instance the OperaDriver can be made to start the browser with specific command-line arguments using the opera.arguments key. This key should define a list of a command-line arguments that should be passed to the browser on startup. For example, to start Opera with a custom profile:

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.opera();

OperaProfile profile = new OperaProfile("/path/to/profile");  // prepared profile
capabilities.setCapability("opera.profile", profile);

WebDriver driver = new OperaDriver(capabilities);

Or to tell the Opera Mobile Emulator to use the tablet UI and a specific screen resolution:

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.opera();

capabilities.setCapability("opera.product", OperaProduct.MOBILE);
capabilities.setCapability("opera.arguments", "-tabletui -displaysize 860x600");

WebDriver driver = new OperaDriver(capabilities);

Similarly, to increase the logging verbosity and, for GNU/Linux, ask Opera to start on a different X display:

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.opera();

capabilities.setCapability("opera.logging.level", Level.CONFIG);
capabilities.setCapability("opera.logging.file", "/var/log/operadriver.log");
capabilities.setCapability("opera.display", 8);

WebDriver driver = new OperaDriver(capabilities);

It is also possible to configure a proxy for use with Opera. The proxy configuration is set through the capabilities. You can use the Proxy helper in Selenium to manage it:

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.opera();

Proxy proxy = new Proxy();
proxy.setHttpProxy("127.0.0.1:1234");
capabilities.setCapability("proxy", proxy);

WebDriver driver = new OperaDriver(capabilities);

To specify a custom location of the Opera binary and the command-line arguments to use, you may also use environmental variables. These are the available variables:

To set environment variables:

• GNU/Linux and Mac: export OPERA_PATH=..., and add this line to ~/.bashrc (or your shell's configuration file) to use in all future sessions.
• Windows: Please follow this guide: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310519

This is a list of the official Opera Desktop versions supported by OperaDriver:

(Not released yet.)

Some Opera versions don't support the -autotestmode, -debugproxy or -pd arguments sent by OperaDriver by default. You can bypass this problem by creating a wrapper script like this and pointing the capability opera.binary to its absolute path:

#!/bin/sh
# Wrapper to prevent the -autotestmode argument reaching this version of Opera
# which doesn't support it.
`dirname $0`/opera

While OperaDriver is officially maintained by Opera, it is free software and would only be possible thanks to many volunteer contributors. If you come across a reproducible bug, please open an issue to submit a bug report.

Even better, you can send a pull request! Any changes you make must follow the Google Coding Standards and have test cases attached to them if you introduce a new feature.

Much of OperaDriver's code is shared with the other WebDriver implementations, and for working on this code base you should also familiarize yourself with the Selenium code base. There are also a few tips available for working on Selenium.

If you have problems or questions regarding OperaDriver or Selenium, there are many channels in which you can seek help:

• IRC: The #selenium channel on the irc.freenode.org network
• Mailing lists: The webdriver or selenium-users mailing list