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I completely understand the way wptdriver was designed and built. It's actually a tremendous feat of wizardry that this app runs so consistently on the platforms it's called to do so.

Regrettably, we're in a terribly restricted environment and are quite happy managing the updates on our own. Because of the security restrictions, we've been locked out of deploying/executing the app because it requires admin or higher rights on a system.

The question is this:
Can a version of wptdriver be built that attempts to install _nothing_?

I've stripped everything I can from the .ini file so it shouldn't be _looking_ to install anything, but it's still giving me the admin authentication screen whenever it starts.

Please respond if elaboration is needed.

Many thanks!
Ben

p.s. I've tried the nodeJS agent in an attempt to get around some of these challenges, but so far all efforts have been unsuccessful.

It's not just installing, it needs the admin rights to clear the OS dns cache, IE cache and a few other things. It might also currently need it to install the system-wide hook that injects the code into the browsers but that may be user-specific already.

Admin rights are also needed for talking to the dummynet driver and setting the traffic-shaping parameters which is pretty key.

As a result the exe has a manifest asking for admin rights which is why you get the prompt.

Can you open a github issue to track it?

I can take a shot but things will be incrementally broken until alternatives land. Most notably, traffic-shaping will be broken the longest until I build the new traffic-shaper driver I'm planning on creating. It may also be possible to integrate with tsproxy which is a user-mode python proxy for doing traffic-shaping. It's not as good as doing it at the packet level but it's a lot better than what dev tools provides.

Off the top of my head it will take:

- Another build target (wptuserdriver or something) that doesn't have the admin manifest setting
- wptupdate and wptwatchdog will need to be updated to know which version of wptdriver to re-launch
- Clearing cert caches, dns and IE caches will need to fail gracefully if they fail (they may already)
- The hack for disabling chrome's extension warning will need to create the symlink in a user-writable folder
- Build the dummynet replacement for traffic-shaping (needed anyway for Windows 10 and other systems - was planning on starting that later this month)
- Possibly integrate with tsproxy for no-rights installs