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I want to run selenium through chromium. I wrote this code:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
options = Options()
options.add_argument("start-maximized")
options.add_argument("disable-infobars")
options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")
options.add_argument("--disable-gpu")
options.add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage")
options.add_argument("--no-sandbox")
options.binary_location = "/snap/bin/chromium"
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)

But this code throws an error:

selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist
Stacktrace:
#0 0x55efd7355a23 <unknown>
#1 0x55efd6e20e18 <unknown>
#2 0x55efd6e46e12 <unknown>

The chromedriver of the correct version is in usr/bin. What am I doing wrong?

Gilles Quénot
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Dima
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  • If the chrome driver is in `/usr/bin`, then why are you telling it `/snap/bin/chromium`? – Tim Roberts Jan 23 '22 at 19:46
  • By default selenium runs google chrome. From this answer https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49298245/selenium-python-with-chromium-browser-windows, I see that this is how chromium is launched, but I did not find analogues with Linux, in all questions they forward the path to the chromium exe – Dima Jan 23 '22 at 19:54
  • There are some similar questions. It appears to be incompaibility between the ChromeDriver and the actual Chromium instance. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50642308/webdriverexception-unknown-error-devtoolsactiveport-file-doesnt-exist-while-t – Tim Roberts Jan 23 '22 at 20:04

5 Answers5

5

I solved the problem by reinstalling chromium through apt sudo apt install chromium-browser (before that it was installed through snap). My working code looks like this

options = Options()
options.add_argument("start-maximized")
options.add_argument("disable-infobars")
options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")
options.add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage")
options.add_argument("--no-sandbox")
if headless:
options.add_argument('--headless')
options.binary_location = "/usr/bin/chromium-browser"
self.driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
Dima
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  • Are you sure the `--headless` argument isn't what fixed it? – Ilya Aug 19 '22 at 02:34
  • I'm using ubuntu 22.04 server. After similar same issues the following worked for me: "const service = new chrome.ServiceBuilder('./chromedriver'); const driver = new Builder().forBrowser('chrome').setChromeService(service).setChromeOptions(new chrome.Options().addArguments( ['--headless','--no-sandbox'])).build();" I systematically went through the other options and when I didn't have the headless and sandbox it broke. – Ben Summerhayes Mar 24 '23 at 18:00
4

This is because you have specified --user-data-dir and maybe a --profile-directory, and there is already a running Chrome instance which would have created a DevToolsActivePort in your specified user data dir. Thus selenium will be unable to spawn a new browser instance.

My solution is to copy the Default and Profile 1 folders (which are the two profiles I used in my case) under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\ to my newly created D:\user_data, and specify --user-data-dir to be D:\user_data. This way I have a copy of user data for selenium only.

Hope this will solve your problem.

user9818
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    This helped me track down my issue with my script when initially running it, and then having it run as a systemd service. – kyrlon May 27 '23 at 18:26
1

I found the solution here: selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist with chromium browser and Selenium Python

In ubuntu, chromium is installed using snap by default, and it breaks selenium.

The following fixed the problem:

sudo snap remove chromium

Then installing the proprietary chrome from https://www.google.com/chrome/

(The official chromium deb package just contains a snap).

lovasoa
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0

Thumb rule

A common cause for Chrome to crash during startup is running Chrome as root user (administrator) on Linux. While it is possible to work around this issue by passing --no-sandbox flag when creating your WebDriver session, such a configuration is unsupported and highly discouraged. You need to configure your environment to run Chrome as a regular user instead.

However you need to take careof a couple of things:

  • --disable-gpu was related to , so you need to drop it.

  • chrome_options is deprecated, use options instead.

    driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)

References

You can find a couple of relevant detailed discussions in:

undetected Selenium
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0

I was getting this error after upgrading my chromedriver version to 86 and Python runtime to 3.8 from 3.6 on AWS Lambda (Amazon Linux 2) run in a docker container. I played whack a mole for hours with chrome/chromedriver starting issues.

Eventually I found this actively maintained min miplementation of python+selenium+docker. https://github.com/umihico/docker-selenium-lambda/ The setup in their Dockerfile and test.py chrome_options worked.

Kyle
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