Ubuntu: selenium.common.exceptions: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 79

Question

I have a python script running on an EC2 instance (ubuntu) on AWS. It uses selenium. It was working perfectly for weeks, and then all of the sudden, today, it stopped work

Answer 1

This error message...

selenium.common.exceptions.SessionNotCreatedException: Message: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 79

...implies that the ChromeDriver v79 was unable to initiate/spawn a new Browsing Context i.e. Chrome Browser session where the browser version was other then v79.x.

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Your main issue is the incompatibility between the version of the binaries you are using as follows:

• You mentioned about using chromedriver=79.0.3945.79. Though the released versions of ChromeDriver v79.x are ChromeDriver 79.0.3945.16 (2019-10-30) and ChromeDriver 79.0.3945.36 (2019-11-18), however both the release notes of chromedriver=79.0.3945.79 clearly mentions the following :

Supports Chrome v79

• You are using chromium-browser v79.0.3945.79 browser.
• ChromeDriver supports google-chrome when installed at the default location with respect to the underlying os:

¹For Linux systems, the ChromeDriver expects /usr/bin/google-chrome to be a symlink to the actual Chrome binary.

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Solution

There are two solutions:

• Either you upgrade google-chrome installed at the default location to current Chrome Version 79.0 level. (as per ChromeDriver v79.0 release notes)

• Or you can override the default Chrome binary location i.e. /usr/bin/google-chrome with the chromium-browser binary location following the documentation Using a Chrome executable in a non-standard location as follows:

  from selenium import webdriver
  from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
  
  options = Options()
  options.binary_location='/path/to/chromium-browser.exe'
  driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=r'C:\Utility\BrowserDrivers\chromedriver.exe', options=options)
  driver.get('http://google.com/')
  

You can find a detailed discussion in How to run a Chromium Browser with Selenium?

• Clean your Project Workspace through your IDE and Rebuild your project with required dependencies only.
• If your base Web Client version is too old, then uninstall it and install a recent GA and released version of Web Client.
• Take a System Reboot.
• Execute your @Test as non-root user.
• Always invoke driver.quit() within tearDown(){} method to close & destroy the WebDriver and Web Client instances gracefully.

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Reference

You can find a relevant detailed discussion in:

• How to work with a specific version of ChromeDriver while Chrome Browser gets updated automatically through Python selenium

Answer 2

By default, webdriver.Chrome runs /usr/bin/google-chrome if available, not chromium-browser (see Default location of ChromeDriver binary and Chrome binary on windows 7). Check google-chrome --version.