WebDriverException: unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist while trying to initiate Chrome Browser

Question

I am trying to launch chrome with an URL, the browser launches and it does nothing after that.

I am seeing the below error after 1 minute:

Unable to open browser with url: 'https://www.google.com' (Root cause: org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist
  (Driver info: chromedriver=2.39.562718 (9a2698cba08cf5a471a29d30c8b3e12becabb0e9),platform=Windows NT 10.0.15063 x86_64) (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace information)

My configuration:

• Chrome : 66
• ChromeBrowser : 2.39.56

P.S everything works fine in Firefox

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.

---

This error message...

org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist 

...implies that the ChromeDriver was unable to initiate/spawn a new WebBrowser i.e. Chrome Browser session.

Your code trials and the versioning information of all the binaries would have given us some hint about what's going wrong.

However as per Add --disable-dev-shm-usage to default launch flags seems adding the argument --disable-dev-shm-usage will temporary solve the issue.

If you desire to initiate/span a new Chrome Browser session you can use the following solution:

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\path\\to\\chromedriver.exe");
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("start-maximized"); // open Browser in maximized mode
options.addArguments("disable-infobars"); // disabling infobars
options.addArguments("--disable-extensions"); // disabling extensions
options.addArguments("--disable-gpu"); // applicable to windows os only
options.addArguments("--disable-dev-shm-usage"); // overcome limited resource problems
options.addArguments("--no-sandbox"); // Bypass OS security model
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
driver.get("https://google.com");

---

disable-dev-shm-usage

As per base_switches.cc disable-dev-shm-usage seems to be valid only on Linux OS:

#if defined(OS_LINUX) && !defined(OS_CHROMEOS)
// The /dev/shm partition is too small in certain VM environments, causing
// Chrome to fail or crash (see http://crbug.com/715363). Use this flag to
// work-around this issue (a temporary directory will always be used to create
// anonymous shared memory files).
const char kDisableDevShmUsage[] = "disable-dev-shm-usage";
#endif

In the discussion Add an option to use /tmp instead of /dev/shm David mentions:

I think it would depend on how are /dev/shm and /tmp mounted. If they are both mounted as tmpfs I'm assuming there won't be any difference. if for some reason /tmp is not mapped as tmpfs (and I think is mapped as tmpfs by default by systemd), chrome shared memory management always maps files into memory when creating an anonymous shared files, so even in that case shouldn't be much difference. I guess you could force telemetry tests with the flag enabled and see how it goes.

As for why not use by default, it was a pushed back by the shared memory team, I guess it makes sense it should be useing /dev/shm for shared memory by default.

Ultimately all this should be moving to use memfd_create, but I don't think that's going to happen any time soon, since it will require refactoring Chrome memory management significantly.

---

Reference

You can find a couple of detailed discussions in:

• unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist error while executing Selenium UI test cases on ubuntu
• Tests fail immediately with unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist when running Selenium grid through systemd

---

Outro

Here is the link to the Sandbox story.

Answer 2

I started seeing this problem on Monday 2018-06-04. Our tests run each weekday. It appears that the only thing that changed was the google-chrome version (which had been updated to current) JVM and Selenium were recent versions on Linux box ( Java 1.8.0_151, selenium 3.12.0, google-chrome 67.0.3396.62, and xvfb-run).
Specifically adding the arguments "--no-sandbox" and "--disable-dev-shm-usage" stopped the error. I'll look into these issues to find more info about the effect, and other questions as in what triggered google-chrome to update.

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
        ...
        options.addArguments("--no-sandbox");
        options.addArguments("--disable-dev-shm-usage");

Answer 3

We were having the same issues on our jenkins slaves (linux machine) and tried all the options above.

The only thing helped is setting the argument

chrome_options.add_argument('--headless')

But when we investigated further, noticed that XVFB screen doesn't started property and thats causing this error. After we fix XVFB screen, it resolved the issue.

Answer 4

I had the same problem in python. The above helped. Here is what I used in python -

chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument('--headless')
chrome_options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
driver = webdriver.Chrome('/path/to/your_chrome_driver_dir/chromedriver',chrome_options=chrome_options)

Answer 5

I was facing the same issue recently and after some trial and error it worked for me as well.

MUST BE ON TOP:

options.addArguments("--no-sandbox"); //has to be the very first option

BaseSeleniumTests.java

public abstract class BaseSeleniumTests {

    private static final String CHROMEDRIVER_EXE = "chromedriver.exe";
    private static final String IEDRIVER_EXE = "IEDriverServer.exe";
    private static final String FFDRIVER_EXE = "geckodriver.exe";
    protected WebDriver driver;

    @Before
    public void setUp() {
        loadChromeDriver();
    }

    @After
    public void tearDown() {
        if (driver != null) {
            driver.close();
            driver.quit();
        }
    }

    private void loadChromeDriver() {
        ClassLoader classLoader = getClass().getClassLoader();
        String filePath = classLoader.getResource(CHROMEDRIVER_EXE).getFile();
        DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.chrome();
        ChromeDriverService service = new ChromeDriverService.Builder()
                .usingDriverExecutable(new File(filePath))
                .build();
        ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
        options.addArguments("--no-sandbox"); // Bypass OS security model, MUST BE THE VERY FIRST OPTION
        options.addArguments("--headless");
        options.setExperimentalOption("useAutomationExtension", false);
        options.addArguments("start-maximized"); // open Browser in maximized mode
        options.addArguments("disable-infobars"); // disabling infobars
        options.addArguments("--disable-extensions"); // disabling extensions
        options.addArguments("--disable-gpu"); // applicable to windows os only
        options.addArguments("--disable-dev-shm-usage"); // overcome limited resource problems
        options.merge(capabilities);
        this.driver = new ChromeDriver(service, options);
    }

}

GoogleSearchPageTraditionalSeleniumTests.java

@RunWith(SpringRunner.class)
@SpringBootTest
public class GoogleSearchPageTraditionalSeleniumTests extends BaseSeleniumTests {

    @Test
    public void getSearchPage() {
        this.driver.get("https://www.google.com");
        WebElement element = this.driver.findElement(By.name("q"));
        assertNotNull(element);
    }

}

pom.xml

<dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
            <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
</dependencies>

Answer 6

Update:

I am able to get through the issue and now I am able to access the chrome with desired url.

Results of trying the provided solutions:

I tried all the settings as provided above but I was unable to resolve the issue

Explanation regarding the issue:

As per my observation DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist is caused when chrome is unable to find its reference in scoped_dirXXXXX folder.

Steps taken to solve the issue

1. I have killed all the chrome processes and chrome driver processes.

2. Added the below code to invoke the chrome

   System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver","pathto\\chromedriver.exe");    
   ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
   options.setExperimentalOption("useAutomationExtension", false);
   WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
   driver.get(url);
   

Using the above steps I was able to resolve the issue.

Thanks for your answers.

Answer 7

I ran into this problem on Ubuntu 20 with Python Selenium after first downloading the chromedriver separately and then using sudo apt install chromium-browser Even though they were the same version this kept happening.

My fix was to use the provided chrome driver that came with the repo package located at

/snap/bin/chromium.chromedriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options, executable_path='/snap/bin/chromium.chromedriver')

Answer 8

In my case in the following environment:

• Windows 10
• Python 3.7.5
• Google Chrome version 80 and corresponding ChromeDriver in the path C:\Windows
• selenium 3.141.0

I needed to add the arguments --no-sandbox and --remote-debugging-port=9222 to the ChromeOptions object and run the code as administrator user by lunching the Powershell/cmd as administrator.

Here is the related piece of code:

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('headless')
options.add_argument('--disable-infobars')
options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
options.add_argument('--remote-debugging-port=9222')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)

Answer 9

As stated in this other answer:

This error message... implies that the ChromeDriver was unable to initiate/spawn a new WebBrowser i.e. Chrome Browser session.

Among the possible causes, I would like to mention the fact that, in case you are running an headless Chromium via Xvfb, you might need to export the DISPLAY variable: in my case, I had in place (as recommended) the --disable-dev-shm-usage and --no-sandbox options, everything was running fine, but in a new installation running the latest (at the time of writing) Ubuntu 18.04 this error started to occurr, and the only possible fix was to execute an export DISPLAY=":20" (having previously started Xvfb with Xvfb :20&).

Answer 10

I had the same issue, but in my case chrome previously was installed in user temp folder, after that was reinstalled to Program files. So any of solution provided here was not help me. But if provide path to chrome.exe all works:

chromeOptions.setBinary("C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Google\\Chrome\\Application\\chrome.exe");

I hope this helps someone =)

Answer 11

update capabilities in conf.js as

exports.config = {
  seleniumAddress: 'http://localhost:4444/wd/hub',
  specs: ['todo-spec.js'],
  capabilities: {
    browserName: 'chrome',
    chromeOptions: {
      args: ['--disable-gpu', '--no-sandbox', '--disable-extensions', '--disable-dev-shm-usage']
    }
  },

};

Answer 12

In my case it was problem with CI Agent account on ubuntu server, I solved this using custom --user-data-dir

chrome_options.add_argument('--user-data-dir=~/.config/google-chrome')

My account used by CI Agent didn't have necessary permissions, what was interesting everything was working on root account

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
chrome_options.add_argument('--headless')
chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')
chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
chrome_options.add_argument('--profile-directory=Default')
chrome_options.add_argument('--user-data-dir=~/.config/google-chrome')

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chrome_options)
url = 'https://www.google.com'
driver.get(url) 
get_url = driver.current_url 
print(get_url)

Answer 13

In my case it happened when I've tried to use my default user profile:

...
options.addArguments("user-data-dir=D:\\MyHomeDirectory\\Google\\Chrome\\User Data");
...

This triggered chrome to reuse processes already running in background, in such a way, that process started by chromedriver.exe was simply ended.

Resolution: kill all chrome.exe processes running in background.

Answer 14

In my case, I was trying to create a runnable jar on Windows OS with chrome browser and want to run the same on headless mode in unix box with CentOs on it. And I was pointing my binary to a driver that I have downloaded and packaged with my suite. For me, this issue continue to occur irrespective of adding the below:

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("--headless");
options.addArguments("--no-sandbox");
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.args", "--disable-logging");
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.silentOutput", "true");
options.setBinary("/pointing/downloaded/driver/path/in/automationsuite");
options.addArguments("--disable-dev-shm-usage"); // overcome limited resource problems
options.addArguments("disable-infobars"); // disabling infobars
options.addArguments("--disable-extensions"); // disabling extensions
options.addArguments("--disable-gpu"); // applicable to windows os only
options.addArguments("--disable-dev-shm-usage"); // overcome limited resource problems
options.addArguments("window-size=1024,768"); // Bypass OS security model
options.addArguments("--log-level=3"); // set log level
options.addArguments("--silent");//
options.setCapability("chrome.verbose", false); //disable logging
driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

Solution that I've tried and worked for me is, download the chrome and its tools on the host VM/Unix box, install and point the binary to this in the automation suite and bingo! It works :)

Download command:

wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm

Install command:

sudo yum install -y ./google-chrome-stable_current_*.rpm

Update suite with below binary path of google-chrome:

options.setBinary("/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome");

And.. it works!

Answer 15

I also faced this issue while integrating with jenkins server, I was used the root user for jenkin job, the issue was fixed when I changed the user to other user. I am not sure why this error occurs for the root user.

• Google Chrome Version 71.0
• ChromeDriver Version 2.45
• CentOS7 Version 1.153

Answer 16

You can get this error simply for passing bad arguments to Chrome. For example, if I pass "headless" as an arg to the C# ChromeDriver, it fires up great. If I make a mistake and use the wrong syntax, "--headless", I get the DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist error.

Answer 17

No solution worked for my. But here is a workaround:

maxcounter=5
for counter in range(maxcounter):
    try:           
        driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options,
                          service_log_path=logfile,
                          service_args=["--verbose", "--log-path=%s" % logfile])
        break
    except WebDriverException as e:
        print("RETRYING INITIALIZATION OF WEBDRIVER! Error: %s" % str(e))
        time.sleep(10)
        if counter==maxcounter-1:
            raise WebDriverException("Maximum number of selenium-firefox-webdriver-retries exceeded.")

Answer 18

It seems there are many possible causes for this error. In our case, the error happened because we had the following two lines in code:

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", chromeDriverPath);
chromeOptions.setBinary(chromeDriverPath);

It's solved by removing the second line.

Answer 19

It happens when chromedriver fails to figure out what debugging port chrome is using.

One possible cause is an open defect with HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome\UserDataDir

But in my last case, it was some other unidentified cause.

Fortunately setting port number manually worked:

final String[] args = { "--remote-debugging-port=9222" };
options.addArguments(args);
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

Answer 20

I ran into same issue, i am using UBUNTU, PYTHON and OPERA browser. in my case the problem was originated because i had an outdated version of operadriver.

Solution: 1. Make sure you install latest opera browser version ( do not use opera beta or opera developer), for that go to the official opera site and download from there the latest opera_stable version.

2. Install latest opera driver (if you already have an opera driver install, you have to remove it first use sudo rm ...)

wget https://github.com/operasoftware/operachromiumdriver/releases/download/v.80.0.3987.100/operadriver_linux64.zip

   unzip operadriver_linux64.zip
   sudo mv operadriver /usr/bin/operadriver
   sudo chown root:root /usr/bin/operadriver
   sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/operadriver

in my case latest was 80.0.3987 as you can see

3. Additionally i also installed chromedriver (but since i did it before testing, i do not know of this is needed) in order to install chromedriver, follow the steps on previous step :v

4. Enjoy and thank me!

Sample selenium code

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
driver = webdriver.Opera()
driver.get("http://www.python.org")
assert "Python" in driver.title
elem = driver.find_element_by_name("q")
elem.clear()
elem.send_keys("pycon")
elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
assert "No results found." not in driver.page_source
driver.quit()

Answer 21

I run selenium tests with Jenkins running on an Ubuntu 18 LTS linux. I had this error until I added the argument 'headless' like this (and some other arguments):

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("headless"); // headless -> no browser window. needed for jenkins
options.addArguments("disable-infobars"); // disabling infobars
options.addArguments("--disable-extensions"); // disabling extensions
options.addArguments("--disable-dev-shm-usage"); // overcome limited resource problems
options.addArguments("--no-sandbox"); // Bypass OS security model
ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

driver.get("www.google.com");

Answer 22

Old question but a similar issue nearly drove me to insanity so sharing my solution. None of the other suggestions fixed my issue.

When I updated my Docker image Chrome installation from an old version to Chrome 86, I got this error. My setup was not identical but we were instantiating Chrome through a selenium webdriver.

The solution was to pass the options as goog:chromeOptions hash instead of chromeOptions hash. I truly don't know if this was a Selenium, Chrome, Chromedriver, or some other update, but maybe some poor soul will find solace in this answer in the future.

Answer 23

For Ubuntu 20 it did help me to use my systems chromium driver instead of the downloaded one:

# chromium which
/snap/bin/chromium

driver = webdriver.Chrome('/snap/bin/chromium.chromedriver',
                          options=chrome_options)

And for the downloaded webdriver looks like it needs the remote debug port --remote-debugging-port=9222 to be set, as in one of the answers (by Soheil Pourbafrani):

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_argument("--remote-debugging-port=9222")
driver = webdriver.Chrome('<path_to>/chromedriver', options=chrome_options)

Answer 24

I ran into the same issue running Chrome via Behat/Mink and Selenium in a Docker container. After some fiddling, I arrived at the following behat.yml which supplies the switches mentioned above. Note that all of them were required for me to get it running successfully.

default:
    extensions:
        Behat\MinkExtension:
            base_url: https://my.app/
            default_session: selenium2
            selenium2:
                browser: chrome
                capabilities:
                    extra_capabilities:
                        chromeOptions:
                            args:
                                - "headless"
                                - "no-sandbox"
                                - "disable-dev-shm-usage"

Answer 25

In my case, I'm in a Kubernetes environment where I cannot use the default TMPDIR because it will fill up the temp directory with garbage.

So I was using this to use a different tmpdir:

driver = new ChromeDriver(new ChromeDriverService.Builder()
                    .withEnvironment(ImmutableMap.of("TMPDIR", customTmpPath))
                    .build(), options);

But now that I've upgraded everything to the latest, this no longer seems to work. I will need to find a new way to do this.

Answer 26

Wrong port number in my case. Check if port number when starting Selenium server is the same as in your script.

Answer 27

TL;DR: If you are using VirtualBox shared folders, do not create the Chrome profile there!

---

I ran into this error under Debian 10, but it did not occur under Ubuntu 18.04.

In my Selenium tests, I wanted to install an extension, and use the following Chrome options:

chromeOptions.addArguments(
  `load-extension=${this.extensionDir}`,
  `user-data-dir=${this.profileDir}`,
  `disable-gpu`,
  `no-sandbox`,
  `disable-setuid-sandbox`,
  `disable-dev-shm-usage`,
);

The issue was that I was attempting to create a Chrome profile under a nonstandard directory which was part of a VirtualBox shared folder. Despite using the exact same version of Chrome and Chromedriver, it didn't work under Debian.

The solution was to choose a profile directory somewhere else (e.g. ~/chrome-profile).

Answer 28

Had the same issue. I am running the selenium script on Google cloud VM.

options.addArguments("--headless");

The above line resolved my issue. I removed the other optional arguments. I think the rest lines of code mentioned in other answers did not have any effect on resolving the issue on the cloud VM.

Answer 29

I use chromium but I have created a shell script called chrome just to be easy for me to open the browser from dmenu.

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/chromium

Chrome driver looking for chrome in PATH and executes that. In result I got the same error.

org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: unknown error: Chrome failed to start: exited normally.
  (unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist)
  (The process started from chrome location /home/s1n7ax/.local/share/s1n7ax/bin/chrome is no longer running, so ChromeDriver is assuming that Chrome has crashed.)
Build info: version: '3.141.59', revision: 'e82be7d358', time: '2018-11-14T08:17:03'
System info: host: 's1n7ax', ip: '127.0.1.16', os.name: 'Linux', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '5.4.70-1-lts', java.version: '11.0.8'
Driver info: driver.version: ChromeDriver
remote stacktrace: #0 0x56030c96dd99 <unknown>

I just removed the shell script and added a soft link to chromium. Everything working now.

Answer 30

My problem was a bug in php-webdriver. My code was:

$chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();
$chromeOptions->addArguments([
    '--headless',
    '--no-sandbox',
    '--disable-gpu',
    '--disable-dev-shm-usage',
    '--no-proxy-server'
]);
$chromeOptions->setExperimentalOption('detach', true);
$capabilities = DesiredCapabilities::chrome();
$capabilities->setCapability(
    ChromeOptions::CAPABILITY,
    $chromeOptions
);

as you can see, everything is in line with the rest of possible reasons.

But actually capabilities weren't passing to chromedriver. I had to change setting chrome options capability to:

$capabilities->setCapability(
    ChromeOptions::CAPABILITY_W3C, // <<< Have to use W3C capabilities with recent versions of Chromedriver.
    $chromeOptions->toArray() // <<<<< bug in php-webdriver 1.9, object not getting serialized automatically like with the deprecated capability ChromeOptions::CAPABILITY
);

My setup was:

$ chromedriver --version
ChromeDriver 79.0.3945.36 (3582db32b33893869b8c1339e8f4d9ed1816f143-refs/branch-heads/3945@{#614})
$ java -jar selenium-server-standalone-3.141.59.jar --version
Selenium server version: 3.141.59, revision: e82be7d358

Made a bug report and a PR to fix this bug in php-webdriver

https://github.com/php-webdriver/php-webdriver/issues/849