Selenium Webdriver on RPI refusing connection from Crontab, works from terminal

Question

I have a perfectly fine running python-script on my raspberry to open a website, navigate to a specific part, copy some text, save it and then compare it to something else. It works great when I start it from the terminal.

But when I have it as a cronjob, it fails with the Message "The browser appears to have exited before we could connect. If you specified a log_file in the FirefoxBinary constructor, check it for details." So the part, that is not working is:

from selenium import webdriver

try:
    driver = webdriver.Firefox()
except Exception as e:
    print(e)

As you can see I did not specify a Log-path, because I honestly don't know how. So if you can tell me that, I will gladly try to implement that and get the log.

Is there anything special you have to do, to get it started as a cronjob? I call it with

*/1 * * * * root cd /home/pi/Desktop && sudo python WebAlert.py >> /var/log/myjob.log 2>&1

From the terminal it works with python WebAlert.py

Thank you very much guys, I'm out of ideas.

EDIT I changed some lines. I added this: binary = FirefoxBinary('/usr/bin/iceweasel')

and I changed the driver like this:

driver = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path=r'/usr/local/bin/geckodriver', firefox_binary=binary)

Calling it in the crontab with this

cd /home/pi/Desktop && sudo ../../../usr/bin/python3 WebAlert.py >> /var/log/mylog.log

produces the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/pi/Desktop/WebAlert.py", line 37, in driver = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path=r'/usr/local/bin/geckodriver', firefox_binary=binary) File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/webdriver.py", line 174, in init keep_alive=True) File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 157, in init self.start_session(capabilities, browser_profile) File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 252, in start_session response = self.execute(Command.NEW_SESSION, parameters) File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 321, in execute self.error_handler.check_response(response) File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 242, in check_response raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace) selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: connection refused

AnanasXpress AnanasXpress · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-12T21:11:25

Adding the following code before starting the driver solved my problem:

from pyvirtualdisplay import Display 
display = Display(visible=0, size=(1024, 768))
display.start()

Selenium Webdriver on RPI refusing connection from Crontab, works from terminal

1 Answers