WebDriverError error: Chrome failed to start: exited abnormally

3
votes

I'm trying to run protractor test on ubuntu 14.04 vm (by google cloud), for some reason when i run 'protractor conf.js' i get an error says:

E/launcher - WebDriverError: unknown error: Chrome failed to start: exited abnormally

I followed this tasks in order to install headless chrome: https://gist.github.com/alonisser/11192482

  • Before running protractor cons.js, i'm running "webdriver-manager start"

  • When i run 'Xvfb -ac :2 -screen 0 1280x1024x16' its freeze when gets to 'Initializing built-in extension GLX'

  • I also tried change the conf.js to chromeOptions: { args: [ "--headless", "--disable-gpu", "--window-size=800x600" ]' but and protractor print 'start' then error: 'Failed: unknown error: an X display is required for keycode conversions, consider using Xvfb'

  • It's important to mention that it's all worked great, before a couple hours. then i just let my mac sleep, and of course it was exit the vm..

  • I'm running the same tests with protractor in my mac and its works great. the problem is related to chrome/chromeDriver on the instance vm.

thanks a lot!!!

2
linuxgoogle-chromeprotractorselenium-chromedriverxvfb
Can you also tell us the versions of Chrome and Chromedriver which you are using. Chrome has just been updated to version 59 so you need to have ChromeDriver 2.30 – wswebcreation
google-chrome --version -> Google Chrome 59.0.3071.104 chromedriver --version -> ChromeDriver 2.30.477691 also: [email protected] and [email protected] – Shir Avr
Hope this might help you stackoverflow.com/questions/39080917/… – Sudharsan Selvaraj

2 Answers

13
votes

I had a similar problem when using selenium + python 2.7 + chromedriver in a AWS EC2 machine.

In my case I was using the newest headless feature, so adding 'no-sandbox' parameter to the ChromeOptions object did the trick.

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_argument('headless')
chrome_options.add_argument('no-sandbox')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=chrome_options)

The problem seems to be a permission issue with chrome. It does not allow a 'root' user to execute it without the --no-sandbox flag

2
votes

Turned out, the answer is in my question.

You should run the command Xvfb -ac :99 -screen 0 1280x1024x16

and right after export DISPLAY=:99

I also add to my start.sh script the command export DISPLAY=:99 The order seems to be important. You can ignore the error of the GLX when running the Xvfb, it can work without it.