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pythonseleniumselenium-webdrivergoogle-colaboratorychromium

Selenium in google colab stopped working showing an error as Service chromedriver unexpectedly exited. Status code was: 1

Few hour ago my setup in google colab for selenium worked fine. Now it stopped working all of a sudden. This is a sample:

!pip install selenium
!apt-get update 
!apt install chromium-chromedriver

from selenium import webdriver
chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_argument('--headless')
chrome_options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
driver = webdriver.Chrome('chromedriver',
                          chrome_options=chrome_options)

I get the error:

WebDriverException: Message: Service chromedriver unexpectedly exited. Status code was: 1

Any ideas on solving it?

Solution

  • This error message...

    WebDriverException: Message: Service chromedriver unexpectedly exited. Status code was: 1

    ...implies that the chromedriver service unexpectedly exited.

    This is because of the of an issue induced as the colab system was updated from v18.04 to ubuntu v20.04 LTS recently.

    The main reason is, with Ubuntu v20.04 LTS no longer distributes chromium-browser outside of a snap package.

    Quick Fix

    @mco-gh created a new notebook following @metrizable's guidance (details below) which is working perfect as of now: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1cbEvuZOhkouYLda3RqiwtbM-o9hxGLyC

    Solution

    As a solution you can install a compatible version of chromium-browser from the Debian buster repository using the following code block published by @metrizable in the discussion Issues when trying to use Chromedriver in Colab

    %%shell
# Ubuntu no longer distributes chromium-browser outside of snap
#
# Proposed solution: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1204571/how-to-install-chromium-without-snap

# Add debian buster
cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list <<'EOF'
deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-buster.gpg] http://deb.debian.org/debian buster main
deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-buster-updates.gpg] http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates main
deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-security-buster.gpg] http://deb.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main
EOF

# Add keys
apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys DCC9EFBF77E11517
apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 648ACFD622F3D138
apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 112695A0E562B32A

apt-key export 77E11517 | gpg --dearmour -o /usr/share/keyrings/debian-buster.gpg
apt-key export 22F3D138 | gpg --dearmour -o /usr/share/keyrings/debian-buster-updates.gpg
apt-key export E562B32A | gpg --dearmour -o /usr/share/keyrings/debian-security-buster.gpg

# Prefer debian repo for chromium* packages only
# Note the double-blank lines between entries
cat > /etc/apt/preferences.d/chromium.pref << 'EOF'
Package: *
Pin: release a=eoan
Pin-Priority: 500


Package: *
Pin: origin "deb.debian.org"
Pin-Priority: 300


Package: chromium*
Pin: origin "deb.debian.org"
Pin-Priority: 700
EOF

# Install chromium and chromium-driver
apt-get update
apt-get install chromium chromium-driver