Handling the Selenium server is out of scope of the actual WebdriverIO project. This service helps you to run Selenium seamlessly when running tests with the WDIO testrunner. It uses the well know selenium-standalone NPM package that automatically setups the standalone server and all required driver for you.

The easiest way is to keep wdio-selenium-standalone-service as a devDependency in your package.json.

{
  "devDependencies": {
    "wdio-selenium-standalone-service": "~0.1"
  }
}

You can simple do it by:

npm install wdio-selenium-standalone-service --save-dev

Instructions on how to install WebdriverIO can be found here.

By default, Google Chrome, Firefox and PhantomJS are available when installed on the host system. In order to use the service you need to add selenium-standalone to your service array:

// wdio.conf.js
export.config = {
  // ...
  services: ['selenium-standalone'],
  // ...
};

Path where all logs from the Selenium server should be stored.

Type: String

Array of arguments for the Selenium server, passed directly to child_process.spawn.

Type: String[]
Default: []

For more information on WebdriverIO see the homepage.