Most basic Selenium webdriver “Hello World” fails miserably

Question

My selenium webdriver 'hello world' program is error-ing. Apologies since I am very new to this.

I spun up a new Ubuntu image and here is my setup:

Ubuntu 18.04 with Google Chrome installed
Ruby on Rails
selenium-webdriver gem installed
VNC is installed

My 'hello world' program:

        require "selenium-webdriver"
        **driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :chrome**
        driver.navigate.to "http://www.google.com"
        element = driver.find_element(:name, 'q')
        element.send_keys "Hello Selenium WebDriver!"
        element.submit
        puts driver.title

This spits out the error:

/home/user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.3/gems/selenium-webdriver-3.142.7/lib/selenium/webdriver/remote/response.rb:72:in `assert_ok': unknown error: Chrome failed to start: exited abnormally (Selenium::WebDriver::Error::UnknownError) (unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist) (The process started from chrome location /usr/bin/google-chrome is no longer running, so ChromeDriver is assuming that Chrome has crashed.) (Driver info: chromedriver=2.41.578700 (2f1ed5f9343c13f73144538f15c00b370eda6706),platform=Linux 5.0.0-1028-gcp x86_64)

(This error happens at the boldfaced line of code)

I checked with whereis command for google-chrome and google-chrome-stable. They are both in /usr/bin/

I also have VNC installed and I am looking at the operating system. When I run this program, I am hoping for Chrome to pop out but nothing happens.

Is Selenium supposed to start chrome (visible to me in VNC)? In any case, what am I doing wrong?

Have you started Chrome with an active debugging port? stackoverflow.com/a/60008226/2662958 — snnguyen

scilence scilence · Accepted Answer · 2020-02-11T02:20:49

A few things can be going wrong here.

First things first, make sure you have an up-to-date copy of chromedriver installed on the machine. You can extract and place the executable in any location that's included in $PATH (echo $PATH to see where these directories are located).

If you're still having issues, it's worth trying to add the following options to the driver initialization, like this:

options = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.new
options.headless!
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :chrome, options: options

If that works for you, this may be an issue related to the x window manager that's installed (or not installed). Alternatively to messing around with something like that, you could check out XVFB to run selenium tests in.

Most basic Selenium webdriver “Hello World” fails miserably

1 Answers