prerender.io headless chrome won't start

Question

I'm trying to start prerender with headless chrome(v62) on my Centos7 sistem but it won't start. When running "node server.js" I get:

2017-11-23T08:50:08.329Z Starting Prerender

2017-11-23T08:50:08.331Z Starting Chrome

2017-11-23T08:50:08.343Z Prerender server accepting requests on port 3000

2017-11-23T08:50:08.392Z Chrome connection closed... restarting Chrome

2017-11-23T08:50:08.392Z Chrome died immediately after restart... stopping Prerender

Does anyone know what could be the cause? Thank you very much

user_8308456 · Answer

That's because you can't run Chrome as root. Try running the command "sudo node server.js" with another user.

For this you need to add that user to Sudoers, here is a great tutorial how to do that https://www.webhostinghero.com/add-a-user-to-sudoers-in-centos-linux/

user_7101158 · Answer

solution was modifying the server.js file from the prerender module

var server = prerender({
  chromeFlags: ['--no-sandbox', '--headless', '--disable-gpu', '--remote-debugging-port=9222', '--hide-scrollbars']
});

user_4561506 · Answer

A great way to find out the underlying issue is to try running chrome on it's own. Then if it fails it should give you an error as to why. Just find your chrome executable and pass in all the flags you're using with prerender and see what happens.

For me, chrome wasn't starting because the windows system I was running it on didn't have the required Font files that chrome needed to start up.

Although it may be windows specific, you can find more info on that here: https://github.com/prom3theu5/ServerCoreFonts

prerender.io headless chrome won't start

4 Answers