WebDriverException: Message: Service chromedriver unexpectedly exited. Status code was: 127

I'd like to construct my crawler using selenium on my server.

Thus I had installed/download required dependencies- such as chromedriver, chromium-browser etc on my Ubuntu17.10 server

However, when I run following code:

driver = webdriver.Chrome()

It returns following error:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
WebDriverException                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-14-2cdab8938403> in <module>()
----> 1 driver = webdriver.Chrome()

/home/zachary/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/chrome/webdriver.py in __init__(self, executable_path, port, options, service_args, desired_capabilities, service_log_path, chrome_options)
     66             service_args=service_args,
     67             log_path=service_log_path)
---> 68         self.service.start()
     69 
     70         try:

/home/zachary/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/common/service.py in start(self)
     96         count = 0
     97         while True:
---> 98             self.assert_process_still_running()
     99             if self.is_connectable():
    100                 break

/home/zachary/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/common/service.py in assert_process_still_running(self)
    109             raise WebDriverException(
    110                 'Service %s unexpectedly exited. Status code was: %s'
--> 111                 % (self.path, return_code)
    112             )
    113 

WebDriverException: Message: Service chromedriver unexpectedly exited. Status code was: 127

What does it mean that it's excited..?

I can't get what the original intention of that error code and where to start to fix it.

It looks very rare case.

Maybe relevant:

I had install ubuntu desktop 17.10 on my desktop but failed to get GUI boot. Thus I am just using terminal only, but it well works so far. I had installed ssh and remote controlling jupyter notebook from my mac to server desktop, and those errors comes from it. Hope this info is relevant to solve this error, otherwise will abort it.

Solution 1:

It seems chromedriver needs some extra libraries. This solved the issue for me:

apt-get install -y libglib2.0-0=2.50.3-2 \
    libnss3=2:3.26.2-1.1+deb9u1 \
    libgconf-2-4=3.2.6-4+b1 \
    libfontconfig1=2.11.0-6.7+b1

I was working on a similar setup using a docker container instead of a server/VM without X / GUI.

To figure out which dependencies are required I tried iteratively to run it from the command line like this: /opt/chromedriver/2.33/chromedriver --version over and over again.

Then at eache time I used commands like apt-cache search <STUFF> and apt-cache madison <STUFF> to figure out the exact version of the deb package needed by chromedriver 2.33 (in my case, but I guess something similar would work for any version of chromedriver).

Edit

As suggested in the comments, using the ldd command to print shared object dependencies may be another option. As of today my chromedriver version after a few years from the original answer is 83.0.4103.14 - the dependencies are different as well, but see below to get an idea of what could be missing:

$ /usr/local/bin/chromedriver --version
ChromeDriver 83.0.4103.14 (be04594a2b8411758b860104bc0a1033417178be-refs/branch-heads/4103@{#119})
$ ldd /usr/local/bin/chromedriver
        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007fffff7f0000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f414739d000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f414737a000)
        librt.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0x00007f414736f000)
        libglib-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0x00007f4147246000)
        libnss3.so => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss3.so (0x00007f41470f7000)
        libnssutil3.so => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnssutil3.so (0x00007f41470c4000)
        libnspr4.so => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnspr4.so (0x00007f4147082000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6 (0x00007f4146f45000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007f4146df6000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f4146ddb000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f4146be9000)
        /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f4147e56000)
        libpcre.so.3 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3 (0x00007f4146b76000)
        libplc4.so => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libplc4.so (0x00007f4146b6d000)
        libplds4.so => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libplds4.so (0x00007f4146b68000)
        libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1 (0x00007f4146b3e000)
        libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXau.so.6 (0x00007f4146b38000)
        libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x00007f4146b30000)
        libbsd.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbsd.so.0 (0x00007f4146b14000)

From man ldd:

ldd prints the shared objects (shared libraries) required by each program or shared object specified on the command line.

...

In the usual case, ldd invokes the standard dynamic linker (see ld.so(8)) with the LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS environment variable set to 1. This causes the dynamic linker to inspect the program's dynamic dependencies, and find (according to the rules described in ld.so(8)) and load the objects that satisfy those dependencies. For each dependency, ldd displays the location of the matching object and the (hexadecimal) address at which it is loaded.

Solution 2:

I encountered the same error when using selenium/chromedriver on my VPS. I installed chromium-browser and the problem was gone.

sudo apt-get install -y chromium-browser

Maybe it's not the chromium-browser is needed, but the packages were installed along with it. However, that was a quick fix.

Solution 3:

Run this command to troubleshoot: ./chromedriver (where your chrome driver binary is).

You might see an error like this:

./chromedriver: error while loading shared libraries: libnss3.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

To solve this error, simply run: sudo apt-get install libnss3.

Then check again and see if it works this time: ./chromedriver.

Some other packages might be missing as well. Here is an exhaustive list:

gconf-service libasound2 libatk1.0-0 libc6 libcairo2 libcups2 libdbus-1-3 libexpat1 libfontconfig1 libgcc1 libgconf-2-4 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libnspr4 libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libstdc++6 libx11-6 libx11-xcb1 libxcb1 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxext6 libxfixes3 libxi6 libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxss1 libxtst6 ca-certificates fonts-liberation libappindicator1 libnss3 lsb-release xdg-utils wget

You probably don't need all of them but the ones you need are likely to be listed above.

Solution 4:

I had a similar issue but it turned out that my problem was incorrectly set service_log_path which was pointing to a deleted folder.

webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='/path/to/chromedriver', service_log_path='/path/to/existing/folder')