RHEL 8 - Selenium unknown error: Chrome failed to start: crashed

Question

Error

I see:

/opt/narjetas/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/error.js:524
    let err = new ctor(data.message)
              ^

WebDriverError: unknown error: Chrome failed to start: crashed.
  (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.)
    at Object.throwDecodedError (/opt/narjetas/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/error.js:524:15)
    at parseHttpResponse (/opt/narjetas/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/http.js:587:13)
    at Executor.execute (/opt/narjetas/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/http.js:515:28)
    at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:96:5) {
  remoteStacktrace: '#0 0x564c9d0c4463 <unknown>\n' +
    '#1 0x564c9ce888d8 <unknown>\n' +
    '#2 0x564c9ceb0b6a <unknown>\n' +
    '#3 0x564c9ceabc05 <unknown>\n' +
    '#4 0x564c9ceef802 <unknown>\n' +
    '#5 0x564c9ceef2af <unknown>\n' +
    '#6 0x564c9cee7443 <unknown>\n' +
    '#7 0x564c9ceb83c5 <unknown>\n' +
    '#8 0x564c9ceb9531 <unknown>\n' +
    '#9 0x564c9d116dce <unknown>\n' +
    '#10 0x564c9d11a192 <unknown>\n' +
    '#11 0x564c9d0fb93e <unknown>\n' +
    '#12 0x564c9d11b103 <unknown>\n' +
    '#13 0x564c9d0eed85 <unknown>\n' +
    '#14 0x564c9d13c0a8 <unknown>\n' +
    '#15 0x564c9d13c239 <unknown>\n' +
    '#16 0x564c9d157492 <unknown>\n' +
    '#17 0x7f6d909171cf start_thread\n'
}

System is RHEL 8, running in headless mode. This runs without issue on Windows. I have triple checked the chromedriver version and my browser version and they match. The error generates on this line:

    let driver = new Builder()
    .forBrowser('chrome')
    .setChromeOptions(new chrome.Options().headless().windowSize(screen))
    .build();

System Info

It is running on top of nodejs.

Chrome version:

[grant@lab backend]$ google-chrome --version
Google Chrome 107.0.5304.87

I am using this version of chromedriver (the minor versions don't match but they shouldn't need to and this did not present any issues on Windows - there is no Chromedriver for the current minor version afaik)

Permissions

Permissions for chromedriver are 755 and it is running as user (grant)

Answer 1

This isn't the right answer, but if someone else comes here stuck, I just swapped Chrome for Firefox and it worked like a champ out of the box.

    console.log("BUILD 1");
    let driver = new Builder()
    .forBrowser('firefox')
    .setFirefoxOptions(new firefox.Options().headless().windowSize(screen))
    .build();

That was the only change I had to make and it came up immediately.

Answer 2

I had the same issue, but resolved it by installing Java openjdk

yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk-1.8.0.322.b06 -y