Prerequisites to automate web browsers

See the requirements you must comply with to automate web browsers using IBM RPA.

In this topic

Web driver communication port
Policies that affect web drivers
Use profile preferences

Web driver communication port

Web drivers use a randomly allocated port for communication with the target browser. The port allocation ranges from port 49152 to 65535. To ensure reliable and secure communication, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is used for interprocess communication (IPC) on the same computer where the script is running. The allocated port is reserved only for the duration of the Bot's runtime, and is released upon completion.

Policies that affect web drivers

Setting new browser application policies or changing it on the Windows™ registry or local user group might affect the capabilities of the web drivers that IBM RPA uses. The following policies can block web automation according to the web browsers you use:

  • In Mozilla Firefox, the DisableDevTools configuration preference.
  • In Google Chrome, the "Set User Data Directory" policy.

❕ Important: If Microsoft™ Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge apply the same policies to these components, they might also get blocked.

Use profile preferences

IBM RPA defines the Windows™ Temp directory %LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp\ as a default path to store user profile data for each script at run time. If you enable the Use profile preferences parameter in the Start Browser (webStart) command to initialize a browser, the selected user profile data directory is placed at the default web browser path data directory:

  • Google Chrome: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data
  • Mozilla Firefox: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
  • Microsoft Edge™: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default