Selenium Chrome Driver : user data directory is already in use

Question

For this same error there are many questions in Stackoverflow. But none of them solved my problem. So I have to post this again.

My Code:

            ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
            options.AddArguments("--disable-gpu");
            options.AddArguments("--disable-extensions");
            options.AddArgument(@"user-data-dir=C:\Users\myname\AppData\Roaming\Chrome\Profile 6");
            options.AddArgument("--profile-directory=Profile 6");
            IWebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
            driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("https://google.com");

Initially I was getting an error " Unable to move cache folder, access denied." then I have added the line options.AddArguments("--disable-gpu"); and the error is gone.

Now my Code is opening the browser with profile : "Profile 6". But after that its throwing the error Error in the line : IWebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

"Exception thrown: 'OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriverException' in WebDriver.dll An unhandled exception of type 'OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriverException' occurred in WebDriver.dll invalid argument: user data directory is already in use, please specify a unique value for --user-data-dir argument, or don't use --user-data-dir "

I have already read almost all topics related to this error. Few of them are :

How to open a Chrome Profile through --user-data-dir argument of Selenium

InvalidArgumentException: Message: invalid argument: user data directory is already in use error using --user-data-dir to start Chrome using Selenium

How to initiate a new Chrome session when the default session is already running using ChromeDriver and Chrome through Selenium and Python

I am stuck in this problem for more than a week now. Please help.

EDIT: To confirm that I am not using the already opened default user profile, I checked Cheome://version to confirm the user data directory path. Its different than the default.

Also I tried to to run the code after closing all the open chrome instances. This Time I have not received the error. The browser opened by the webdriver. But after that nothing happened. The code got time out error after 60 seconds in the line : IWebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

Answer 1

Possibly you are specifying the wrong directory. Instead of:

C:\Users\myname\AppData\Roaming\Chrome\Profile 6

You need to pass:

C:\Users\myname\AppData\Local\Chrome\Profile 6

So the effective line of code will be:

options.AddArgument(@"user-data-dir=C:\Users\myname\AppData\Local\Chrome\Profile 6");

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Update 1

Additionally, you can remove the argument --profile-directory as in:

options.AddArgument("--profile-directory=Profile 6");  

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Update 2

If I close all the chrome instances and run the code, I am not getting this error means ChromeDriver is able to open the Chrome browsing instance perfectly. But to analyze why nothing happened can be interpreted from the TRACE level logs.

Ensure that:

• JDK is upgraded to current levels JDK 8u251.
• Selenium is upgraded to current levels Version 3.141.59.
• ChromeDriver is updated to current ChromeDriver v83.0 level.
• Chrome is updated to current Chrome Version 83.0 level. (as per ChromeDriver v83.0 release notes)
• If your base Web Client version is too old, then uninstall it and install a recent GA and released version of Web Client.
• Clean your Project Workspace through your IDE and Rebuild your project with required dependencies only.
• If your base Web Client version is too old, then uninstall it and install a recent GA and released version of Web Client.
• Take a System Reboot.
• Execute your @Test as non-root user.
• Always invoke driver.quit() within tearDown(){} method to close & destroy the WebDriver and Web Client instances gracefully.