Selenium IDE

An integrated development environment for Selenium scripts Selenium IDE as an electron application written to enable recording and playback of selenium scripts.

Installation

Installation can be performed in a variety of ways:

1. Prepackaged binaries are available to be installed directly as GitHub releases.
2. Selenium-ide can be installed via npm npm install -g selenium-ide and run via selenium-ide directly. This installs the newest release, betas included.
3. The application can be built manually using the below instructions.

Unsigned builds

The binaries are not code signed yet, so your system warns you the first time you open them:

• macOS: "Apple could not verify Selenium IDE is free of malware". Open System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Selenium IDE.app".
• Windows: SmartScreen says "Windows protected your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway.
• Linux: make the AppImage executable with chmod +x Selenium-IDE-*.AppImage.

Automatic updates don't work on macOS until the builds are signed. Download new versions from the releases page.

Building Manually

To build manually, you must have the below prerequisites installed and follow the steps afterward.

Prerequisites

• Git
• Node.js 22 (22.23.4 or later), 24 (24.22.1 or later), or 26.12.1 or later (CI tests all three)
• Pnpm

Building

1. git clone https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium-ide - Clone the IDE repo
2. cd selenium-ide - Navigate into the IDE folder
3. pnpm -r i - Install dependencies
4. pnpm run build - Build the app
5. pnpm run start - Run the app

What now?

Here's a draft of the general tasks ahead. Feel free to pitch in and announce which you wish to take upon yourself:

• Selectors accuracy - an option is ranking selectors - we can optimize selectors correctness and test stability by collecting as many attributes as we can per user event. The most likely properties will be used for the selectors, with fallback to the others.
• Intelligent editing
• Export to selenium code in different languages

Security

While Selenium IDE is running, it keeps a Chrome DevTools port open on localhost:8315. Playback uses it to control the IDE's browser windows. Any program on the same computer can connect to that port and control those windows, including pages you are logged in to while recording.

Run Selenium IDE only on a computer you trust, and don't record with accounts or data that other local users or programs must not reach. Port 8315 only listens on localhost, so it is not reachable from other computers unless you forward it.

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute to the codebase, start by building manually using the above commands. The below tips are meant to assist you as well.

• If you'd like to iterate more quickly, yarn watch will facilitate near-realtime rebuilding for rapid iteration (make change -> yarn start -> test change)
• To activate the devtools on an page, CommandOrControl+F12 or CommandOrControl+Option+I will open the devtools. For your convenience, the React Developer Tools are pre-installed in the electron environment.
• VSCode has a defined workspace structure and run command, as well as file mappings to allow for breakpoints to work across sourcemaps for the main process.
• The chrome dev tools are available at localhost:8315 to use if the inline devtools are not enough, although I'd highly advocate for the in window dev tools, since they have the React Developer Tools installed as well.

Questions or want to chat?

If you have questions, check out our FAQ.

You can also find us on the #selenium IRC channel, which is also available on Slack.

Architecture

The codebase is javascript, and relies heavily on the NodeJS, Electron, and React ecosystem. This is a collection of packages arranged in a monorepo config. Excepting the code-export packages, which are fully untyped, these packages are fully typed using Typescript.

Packages

These are the main packages. They're used to run the thing:

• selenium-ide: Main Electron app. Built with webpack, react frontend. Communicates via the IPC protocols.

• side-runner: NodeJS Task Runner. Built with typescript.

• side-runtime: Playback system wrapper. Takes side files and executes them. Used by both selenium-ide and side-runner.

• side-api: This is the api shape of selenium-ide. This is intended to be used to help share the api types with plugins in a lower footprint way.

• side-model: This is used to provide metadata around the standard commands and argument types.

• side-commons: This is like the typical utils/helpers folder, except meant to be shared across packages instead of just folders.

• side-code-export: NodeJS transpiler for .side files. Used to export to other languages (csharp, java, javascript, python, ruby).

• code-export-*: Code export format for various languages