Selenium: WebDriverException:Chrome failed to start: crashed as google-chrome is no longer running so ChromeDriver is assuming that Chrome has crashed

This error message…

selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: unknown error: Chrome failed to start: crashed
  (unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist)
  (The process started from chrome location /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome is no longer running, so ChromeDriver is assuming that Chrome has crashed.)

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

Your main issue is the Chrome browser is not installed at the default location within your system.

The server i.e. ChromeDriver expects you to have Chrome installed in the default location for each system as per the image below:

¹For Linux systems, the ChromeDriver expects /usr/bin/google-chrome to be a symlink to the actual Chrome binary.

Solution

In case you are using a Chrome executable in a non-standard location you have to override the Chrome binary location as follows:

• Python Solution:

  from selenium import webdriver
  from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
  
  options = Options()
  options.binary_location = "C:\path\to\chrome.exe"    #chrome binary location specified here
  options.add_argument("--start-maximized") #open Browser in maximized mode
  options.add_argument("--no-sandbox") #bypass OS security model
  options.add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage") #overcome limited resource problems
  options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches", ["enable-automation"])
  options.add_experimental_option('useAutomationExtension', False)
  driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path=r'C:pathtochromedriver.exe')
  driver.get('http://google.com/')
  

• Java Solution:

  System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\Utility\BrowserDrivers\chromedriver.exe");
  ChromeOptions opt = new ChromeOptions();
  opt.setBinary("C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe");  //chrome binary location specified here
  options.addArguments("start-maximized");
  options.setExperimentalOption("excludeSwitches", Collections.singletonList("enable-automation"));
  options.setExperimentalOption("useAutomationExtension", false);
  WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(opt);
  driver.get("https://www.google.com/");
  

Assuming that you already downloaded chromeDriver, this error is also occurs when already multiple chrome tabs are open.

If you close all tabs and run again, the error should clear up.

I encountered the exact problem running on docker container (in build environment). After ssh into the container, I tried running the test manually and still encountered

(unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist)
     (The process started from chrome location /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable is 
      no longer running, so ChromeDriver is assuming that Chrome has crashed.)

When I tried running chrome locally /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable, error message

Running as root without --no-sandbox is not supported

I checked my ChromeOptions and it was missing --no-sandbox, which is why it couldn’t spawn chrome.

capabilities = Selenium::WebDriver::Remote::Capabilities.chrome(
  chromeOptions: { args: %w(headless --no-sandbox disable-gpu window-size=1920,1080) }
)

in my case, the error was with www-data user but not with normal user on development. The error was a problem to initialize an x display for this user. So, the problem was resolved running my selenium test without opening a browser window, headless:

opts.set_headless(True)

hope this helps someone. this worked for me on Ubuntu 18.10

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")
chrome_options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
driver = webdriver.Chrome('/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromedriver', options=chrome_options)
driver.get('http://www.google.com')
print('test')
driver.close()

I had a similar issue, and discovered that option arguments must be in a certain order. I am only aware of the two arguments that were required to get this working on my Ubuntu 18 machine. This sample code worked on my end:

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

options = Options()
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')

d = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=r'/home/PycharmProjects/chromedriver', chrome_options=options)
d.get('https://www.google.nl/')

This error has been happening randomly during my test runs over the last six months (still happens with Chrome 76 and Chromedriver 76) and only on Linux. On average one of every few hundred tests would fail, then the next test would run fine.

Unable to resolve the issue, in Python I wrapped the driver = webdriver.Chrome() in a try..except block in setUp() in my test case class that all my tests are derived from. If it hits the Webdriver exception it waits ten seconds and tries again.

It solved the issue I was having; not elegantly but it works.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.common.exceptions import WebDriverException

try:
    self.driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=chrome_options, desired_capabilities=capabilities)
except WebDriverException as e:
    print("nChrome crashed on launch:")
    print(e)
    print("Trying again in 10 seconds..")
    sleep(10)
    self.driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=chrome_options, desired_capabilities=capabilities)
    print("Success!n")
except Exception as e:
    raise Exception(e)

For RobotFramework

I solved it! using --no-sandbox

${chrome_options}=  Evaluate  sys.modules['selenium.webdriver'].ChromeOptions()  sys, selenium.webdriver
Call Method    ${chrome_options}    add_argument    test-type
Call Method    ${chrome_options}    add_argument    --disable-extensions
Call Method    ${chrome_options}    add_argument    --headless
Call Method    ${chrome_options}    add_argument    --disable-gpu
Call Method    ${chrome_options}    add_argument    --no-sandbox
Create Webdriver    Chrome    chrome_options=${chrome_options}

Instead of

Open Browser    about:blank    headlesschrome
Open Browser    about:blank    chrome

i had same problem. I was run it on terminal with “sudo geany”, you should run it without “sudo” just type on terminal “geany” and it is solved for me.

A simple solution that no one else has said but worked for me was not running without sudo or not as root.

Make sure that both the chromedriver and google-chrome executable have execute permissions

sudo chmod -x "/usr/bin/chromedriver"

sudo chmod -x "/usr/bin/google-chrome"

I came across this error on linux environment. If not using headless then you will need

from sys import platform
    if platform != 'win32':
        from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
        display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
        display.start()

i faced the same problem but i solved it by moving the chromedriver to this path
‘/opt/google/chrome/’

and this code works correctly

from selenium.webdriver import Chrome
driver = Chrome('/opt/google/chrome/chromedrive')
driver.get('https://google.com')

The solutions that every body provide here is good for Clear the face of the issue but

All you need to solve this problem is that You have to run The App on non-root user
on linux.

According to this post

https://github.com/paralelo14/google_explorer/issues/2#issuecomment-246476321

In my case, chrome was broken. following two lines fixed the issue,

apt -y update; apt -y upgrade; apt -y dist-upgrade
apt --fix-broken install

Faced with this issue trying to run/debug Python Selenium script inside WSL2 using Pycharm debugger.
First solution was to use --headless mode, but I prefer to have Chrome GUI during the debug process.

In the system terminal outside Pycharm debugger Chrome GUI worked nice with DISPLAY env variable set this way (followed guide here):

export DISPLAY=$(cat /etc/resolv.conf | grep nameserver | awk '{print $2; exit;}'):0.0

Unfortunately ~/.bashrc is not running in Pycharm during the debug, export is not working.

The way I’ve got Chrome GUI worked from Pycharm debugger: run echo $DISPLAY in WSL2, paste ip (you’ve got something similar to this) 172.18.144.1:0 into Pycharm Debug Configuration > Environment Variables:

Fixed it buy killing all the chrome processeses running in the remote server before running my script.
That may explain why some answers that recommend you run your script as root works.

$ pkill -9 chrome
$ ./my_script.py

Just do not run the script as the root user (in my case).

I had the same problem but it was solved just by reinstalling chrome again with the commands below:

$ wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
$ sudo apt install ./google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

Maybe when you where developing in local, you used options.headless=False in order to see what is the browser doing but you forgot to change it to True in the vm.

For me, the root issue was that the google-chrome/chromedriver version were not compatible with the Selenium version.

Seleniumn and Chrome were working fine until a few days ago and I started getting this missing DevToolsActivePort issue. After trying all sorts of solutions on this thread, it finally occurred to me that the Chrome version might not be compatible with the Selenium version.
Versions at the time of the initial error:

# Below combo does NOT work
Python 3.7.3
selenium==3.141.0
Google Chrome 110.0.5481.77
ChromeDriver 110.0.5481.77

I then downgraded Chrome and ChromeDriver to 109.0.5414.74 but still faced the same error. I checked the versions on a different machine and saw that this combo worked:

# Below combo works
Python 3.7.6
selenium==3.141.0
Google Chrome 80.0.3987.100
ChromeDriver 80.0.3987.16

However, I wasn’t able to find a download for Google Chrome V80. This comment had a download to V97 so that’s the version I went with. There might be higher versions of Google Chrome that do work but after spending so many days fixing this, I was eager to move onto something else.

sudo apt-get purge google-chrome-stable
sudo wget http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/pool/main/g/google-chrome-stable/google-chrome-stable_97.0.4692.71-1_amd64.deb && 
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_97.0.4692.71-1_amd64.deb && 
sudo apt-mark hold google-chrome-stable

wget https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/97.0.4692.71/chromedriver_linux64.zip
sudo unzip chromedriver_linux64.zip chromedriver -d /usr/local/bin

After that, my Selenium calls were able to work again. The final version combo:

# Below combo works
Python 3.7.3
selenium==3.141.0
ChromeDriver 97.0.4692.71
Google Chrome 97.0.4692.71