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

Question

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

Answer 1

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 windows, so you need to drop it.

• chrome_options is deprecated, use options instead.

  driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
  

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References

You can find a couple of relevant detailed discussions in:

• WebDriverException: unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist while trying to initiate Chrome Browser
• Selenium-Python with chromium browser (windows)
• unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist error while executing Selenium UI test cases on ubuntu

Answer 2

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)

Answer 3

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.