How is "chromium-chromedriver" package used?

Question

Firefox selenium driver seems to be crashing (perhaps because I'm on Firefox-beta ppa?):

>>> from selenium import webdriver
>>> webdriver.Firefox
<class 'selenium.webdriver.firefox.webdriver.WebDriver'>
>>> webdriver.Firefox()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/webdriver.py", line 59, in __init__
    self.binary, timeout),
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/extension_connection.py", line 47, in __init__
    self.binary.launch_browser(self.profile)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_binary.py", line 66, in launch_browser
    self._wait_until_connectable()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_binary.py", line 100, in _wait_until_connectable
    raise WebDriverException("The browser appears to have exited "
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: 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 I tried installing the chromium driver but it still fails with selenium:

>>> webdriver.Chrome()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/chrome/webdriver.py", line 59, in __init__
    self.service.start()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/chrome/service.py", line 66, in start
    "ChromeDriver executable needs to be available in the path. "
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: ChromeDriver executable needs to be available in the path. Please download from http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html and read up at http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/ChromeDriver

Am I missing something or is this package completely broken? I have both Chromium and Google Chrome installed for testing, if that matters.

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

The Firefox webdriver failed with this message:

"The browser appears to have exited before we could connect"

Which means that selenium managed to find it. I also believe that beta versions can be the root cause as it works out of the box for me using the repo version.
For Chromium, you have to install the following packages:
```
sudo apt-get install python-selenium chromium-chromedriver
```
And fix the libui_base.so library path (See Chromedriver on Ubuntu 14.04 - error while loading shared libraries: libui_base.so)
To use the Chrome webdriver install the following dependency:
```
sudo apt-get install python-selenium
```
And download the Chromedriver from here, select the one corresponding to your architecture e.g:

http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/2.14/chromedriver_linux64.zip or http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/2.14/chromedriver_linux32.zip

Extract the chromedriver file for example in your $HOME folder.

Then to start the chromedriver from python, open a terminal and type:
```
$ python
Python 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 22:59:56) 
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> from selenium import webdriver
>>> driver = webdriver.Chrome(os.path.expanduser('~/chromedriver'))
```

Finally I'd recommend to use the package version of python-selenium available from the Ubuntu repositories to avoid installation in /usr/local/lib.

How is "chromium-chromedriver" package used?

1 Answers1