WinAppDriver can't connect to application on Windows

Question

I'm getting an error on the line "driver = webdriver.Remote(....)" in the following code:

import unittest
from appium import webdriver
import os
os.startfile('C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Application Driver\WinAppDriver.exe')    
desired_caps = {}
desired_caps['app'] = "Chrome"
desired_caps['platformName'] = "Windows"
desired_caps['deviceName'] = "WindowsPC"
driver = webdriver.Remote("http://127.0.0.1:4723/", desired_caps)

When I debug on Visual Studio Code, I get this message:

Exception has occurred: WebDriverException
Message: 
  File "C:\Users\....", line 31, in 
    driver = webdriver.Remote("http://127.0.0.1:4723/", desired_caps)```

The console log on WinAppDriver.exe is:

Press ENTER to exit.


==========================================
POST //session/ HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Accept-Encoding: identity
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 179
Content-Type: application/json;charset=UTF-8
Host: 127.0.0.1:4723
User-Agent: appium/python 2.6.1 (selenium/4.1.0 (python windows))
X-Idempotency-Key: e7bcc20b-58b0-4239-a551-1a048c935bc6

{"capabilities": {"firstMatch": [{}], "alwaysMatch": {"appium:app": "Chrome", "platformName": "Windows", "appium:deviceName": "WindowsPC"}}}
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

I have already tried the following things and they didn't work:

Referring to the calculator app by 'C:\ProgramFiles\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe' instead of 'Chrome'
Use other applications (instead of Chrome)
Starting WebDriverApp manually

Can someone please help me? It's my first time using WebDriverApp.

Thank you!

user_19761010 · Answer

WinAppDriver uses jsonwire to communicate with selenium/appium-python-client however Selenium 4 and Appium-Python-Client 2.6.1 uses w3c instead.

You can get your code working if you downgrade selenium to v3.141.0 and appium-python-client to v1.3.0

e.g.

pip uninstall selenium
pip uninstall appium-python-client
pip install selenium==3.141.0
pip install appium-python-client==1.3.0

However if you are going to automate webpages via Chrome you would better off using a chromedriver specific to your version of Chrome, then you wouldn't need WinAppDriver.

This code works for me:

from appium import webdriver
import os
os.startfile('C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Application Driver\WinAppDriver.exe')    
desired_caps = {}
desired_caps['app'] = "Chrome"
desired_caps['platformName'] = "Windows"
driver = webdriver.Remote("http://127.0.0.1:4723", desired_caps)

WinAppDriver can't connect to application on Windows

1 Answers