Error message: "'chromedriver' executable needs to be available in the path"

On Ubuntu:

sudo apt install chromium-chromedriver

On Debian:

sudo apt install chromium-driver

On macOS install Homebrew then do

brew install --cask chromedriver

For Linux and OSX

Step 1: Download chromedriver

# You can find more recent/older versions at http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/
# Also make sure to pick the right driver, based on your Operating System
wget http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/81.0.4044.69/chromedriver_mac64.zip

For debian: wget https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/2.41/chromedriver_linux64.zip

Step 2: Add chromedriver to /usr/local/bin

unzip chromedriver_mac64.zip
sudo mv chromedriver /usr/local/bin
sudo chown root:root /usr/local/bin/chromedriver
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/chromedriver

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You should now be able to run

from selenium import webdriver

browser = webdriver.Chrome()
browser.get('http://localhost:8000')

without any issues

You can test if it actually is in the PATH, if you open a cmd and type in chromedriver (assuming your chromedriver executable is still named like this) and hit Enter. If Starting ChromeDriver 2.15.322448 is appearing, the PATH is set appropriately and there is something else going wrong.

Alternatively you can use a direct path to the chromedriver like this:

 driver = webdriver.Chrome('/path/to/chromedriver') 

So in your specific case:

 driver = webdriver.Chrome("C:/Users/michael/Downloads/chromedriver_win32/chromedriver.exe")

I see the discussions still talk about the old way of setting up chromedriver by downloading the binary and configuring the path manually.

This can be done automatically using webdriver-manager

pip install webdriver-manager

Now the above code in the question will work simply with below change,

from selenium import webdriver
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

driver = webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install())

The same can be used to set Firefox, Edge and ie binaries.