Selenium-manager.exe window popping up

Question

While trying to setup a headless browser using selenium a console window pops up briefly before it closes, it's not the chromedriver.exe window cause that's handled by CREATE_NO_WINDOW the window is called selenium-manager.exe.

It only pops up when I build my script into an executable with Pyinstaller cause when I run it normally with Python it doesn't appear. The command I used was pyinstaller --windowed my_script.py, I also tried adding --noconsole and using --noconsole alone but nothing worked. What could be causing this and how do I fix it?

Operation System: Windows-10-10.0.19045-SP0, Python: 3.11.1, Selenium: 4.10.0, Pyinstaller: 5.13.0

from subprocess import CREATE_NO_WINDOW
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver import Chrome, ChromeOptions

def setup_options(options: ChromeOptions) -> ChromeOptions :
    options.add_argument('--headless=new')
    options.add_argument('--disable-extensions')
    options.add_argument('--disable-infobars')
    options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
    return options

def setup_driver() -> Chrome:
    service_chrome = Service()
    service_chrome.creation_flags = CREATE_NO_WINDOW
    options = setup_options(ChromeOptions())
    return Chrome(service=service_chrome, options=options)

driver = setup_driver()
# Do some automated work
driver.quit()

Here's a screenshot of the window:

Answer 1

Update

I made a merged pull request with the fix. This bug should only be present in selenium versions 4.10.0 and below.

Hacky fix, navigate to the following path in your virtual environment ".venv\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\common\selenium_manager.py".

Within the script, there's a method called run in the SeleniumManager class that starts a subprocess that executes the selenium-manager.exe they made an over-sight and assumed everyone would be running their scripts in a console environment or maybe didn't consider windows users, so when making the call to subprocess.run they didn't add creationflags=CREATE_NO_WINDOW.

Edit it as follows

            if sys.platform == "win32":
                completed_proc = subprocess.run(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE, creationflags=subprocess.CREATE_NO_WINDOW)
            else: 
                completed_proc = subprocess.run(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

Note that the bug is only present in windows. They'll probably address it in the next updates.