appium: appium 2.0 fails to load chromdriver which is already installed.

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Current Behavior

I installed chromium driver using command “appium driver install chromium” which was completed successfully. However, when I try to start appium server from cmd by typing appium, it fails to load chromium driver with an error message.

[Appium] Welcome to Appium v2.0.0-beta.52 [Appium] Attempting to load driver uiautomator2... [debug] [Appium] Requiring driver at C:\Users\xxxx\.appium\node_modules\appium-uiautomator2-driver [Appium] Attempting to load driver chromium... [Appium] Could not load driver 'chromium', so it will not be available. Error in loading the driver was: Could not find a driver installed at C:\Users\xxxx\.appium\node_modules\appium-chromium-driver [debug] [Appium] ReferenceError: Could not find a driver installed at C:\Users\xxxx\.appium\node_modules\appium-chromium-driver [debug] [Appium] at DriverConfig.require (C:\Users\xxxx\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\appium\lib\extension\extension-config.js:539:13) [debug] [Appium] at C:\Users\xxxx\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\appium\lib\extension\index.js:83:46 [debug] [Appium] at Array.map (<anonymous>) [debug] [Appium] at getActiveDrivers (C:\Users\xxxx\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\appium\lib\extension\index.js:80:10) [debug] [Appium] at main (C:\Users\xxxx\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\appium\lib\main.js:303:41) [Appium] Appium REST http interface listener started on 0.0.0.0:4723 [Appium] Available drivers: [Appium] - uiautomator2@2.12.2 (automationName 'UiAutomator2') [Appium] - chromium@1.0.19 (automationName 'Chromium') [Appium] No plugins have been installed. Use the "appium plugin" command to install the one(s) you want to use.

I have verified that the directory C:\Users\xxxx.appium\node_modules\appium-chromium-driver exists along with files in it. I have also tried uninstalling and re-installing chromium driver.

Expected Behavior

appium server should be able to load chromium driver if it is already installed.

Minimal Reproducible Example

start appium from cmd after installing chromium plugin.

Environment

• Operating system: Windows 10
• If running via appium CLI…
  • Appium CLI version (output of appium --version): 2.0.0-beta.52
  • Node.js version (output of node --version): v16.17.0
  • npm version (output of npm --version): 9.2.0
  • Last appium version which did not exhibit the problem: I haven’t tried other versions.
• If running Appium Desktop, its version:
• Appium driver(s) and their version(s): uiautomator2@2.12.2 , chromium@1.0.19
• Appium plugin(s) and their version(s):
• Platform and version under test: Android
• Real device or emulator/simulator: emulator

Link to Appium Logs

No response

Futher Information

Having installed appium 2 , I also had to manually install @appium/types without which appium driver install chromium kept failing with error message ""Error installing chromdriver: Cannot find module ‘@appium/types’ ". Not sure if this is related.