Selenium won't run without root privileges shows WebDriverException: Message: Service /usr/bin/chromedriver unexpectedly exited error

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I have a selenium script that I execute in another python program. This program will only execute when I am logged into the server using ssh as root but not executable by the www-data user because it returns with the error:

selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: Service /usr/bin/chromedriver unexpectedly exited. Status code was: 1

I run the script using this command:

os.system('python3 /var/website/webscraping.py' + str(VARIABLE))

Any help would be appriciated!

selenium-chromedriver selenium google-chrome apache2 python
2 Answers

Ideally you should have been able to execute the program as www-data user. However this error message...

selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: Service /usr/bin/chromedriver unexpectedly exited. Status code was: 1

...implies that the ChromeDriver unexpectedly exited.

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.

There can be numerous reasons behind this error. Your code trials and the complete error stacktrace would have given us some more visibility on what's wrong happening under the hood.

However, a couple of remedial steps are as follows:

  • Ensure that Chrome is updated to current chrome=96.0.4664.45 (as per chrome=96.0.4664.45 release notes).

  • Ensure that ChromeDriver is updated to current ChromeDriver v96.0 level.

  • Ensure that you have downloaded the exact format of the ChromeDriver binary from the download location pertaining to your underlying OS among:

    • chromedriver_win32: For Windows OS
    • chromedriver_mac64: For MAC OS X
    • chromedriver_linux64: For Linux OS

  • Using Selenium you need to pass the absolute path of the ChromeDriver binary through the argument executable_path and you need to mention the path within single quotes (i.e. '') seperated by a single forward slash (i.e. \) along with the raw switch (i.e. r) as follows:

    from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='/usr/bin/chromedriver')
driver.get(url)

  • Ensure that ChromeDriver binary have executable permission for the non-administrator user.

  • Execute your Test as a non-administrator user.

  • Another potential reason for the error can be due to missing the entry 127.0.0.1 localhost in /etc/hosts

    • Windows OS - Add 127.0.0.1 localhost to /etc/hosts

    • Mac OSX - Ensure the following entries:

      127.0.0.1   localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost

References

As per the discussion in selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: Can not connect to the Service geckodriver:

  • Selenium does not require 127.0.0.1 localhost to be explicitly set in the host file.
  • However it is mandatory requirement to map localhost to the IPv4 local loopback (127.0.0.1)
  • The mechanism of this mapping does not have to be through the hosts file always.
  • On Windows OS systems it is not mapped in the hosts file at all (resolving localhost is done by the DNS resolver).

TL;DR

How to reset the Hosts file back to the default

Update

As per your comment update:

chromedriver is at version 97 and google-chrome is at version 96

Your main issue seems to be the incompatibility between the version of the binaries you are using a there is a clear mismatch between chromedriver=97.0 and the chrome=96.0.4664.45

Solution

Ensure that:

You can find a relevant detailed discussion in WebDriverException: Message: unknown error: Chrome failed to start: exited abnormally." (Driver info: chromedriver=97) using Selenium Python

user_74294470

Looks like your browser version is not matching with the browser binary provided by you in your path. You can implement WebDriverManager to resolve your issue.

  1. Install WebDriverManager module for python

    pip install webdriver-manager

  2. Setup/initialize ChromeDriver service as below

//selenium 3
from selenium import webdriver
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

driver = webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install())

//selenium 4
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service as ChromeService
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=ChromeService(ChromeDriverManager().install()))

More information below -> https://cpsat.agiletestingalliance.org/2021/03/25/selenium-webdriver-manager-in-python/

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