Selenium gives “unknown error: cannot find Chrome

Question

I am trying to run selenium [java] tests using chrome driver on Latest ubuntu.[16.04]

I am getting the following error/exception. As an experiment, I replaced ChromeDriver binary with my native "helloworldApp"; I found that selenium is executing my binary.

I believe the print "Starting ChromeDriver 2.27.440175 (9bc1d90b8bfa4dd181fbbf769a5eb5e575574320) on port 15306" is coming from chrome binary. But why selenium complaining that its not able to get the binary?

Everything works fine on Windows.

Please advice.

     [java] Starting ChromeDriver 2.27.440175 (9bc1d90b8bfa4dd181fbbf769a5eb5e575574320) on port 15306
     [java] Only local connections are allowed.
     [java] Exception in thread "main" org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary
     [java]   (Driver info: chromedriver=2.27.440175 (9bc1d90b8bfa4dd181fbbf769a5eb5e575574320),platform=Linux 4.8.0-46-generic x86_64) (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace information)
     [java] Command duration or timeout: 328 milliseconds
     [java] Build info: version: 'unknown', revision: 'unknown', time: 'unknown'
     [java] System info: host: 'geo-VirtualBox', ip: '127.0.1.1', os.name: 'Linux', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '4.8.0-46-generic', java.version: '9-internal'
     [java] Driver info: org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver
     [java]     at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(java.base@9-internal/Native Method)
     [java]     at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(java.base@9-internal/NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:62)
     [java]     at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(java.base@9-internal/DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45)
     [java]     at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(java.base@9-internal/Constructor.java:453)
     [java]     at org.openqa.selenium.remote.ErrorHandler.createThrowable(ErrorHandler.java:206)
     [java]     at org.openqa.selenium.remote.ErrorHandler.throwIfResponseFailed(ErrorHandler.java:158)
     [java]     at org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver.execute(RemoteWebDriver.java:678)
     [java]     at org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver.startSession(RemoteWebDriver.java:249)
     [java]     at org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver.<init>(RemoteWebDriver.java:131)
     [java]     at org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver.<init>(RemoteWebDriver.java:144)
     [java]     at org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver.<init>(ChromeDriver.java:170)
     [java]     at org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver.<init>(ChromeDriver.java:138)

Answer 1

Pointing to binary location, helped to fix the issue.

Changed from :

capabilities: {
    'browserName': 'chrome'
}

To:

capabilities: {
    'browserName': 'chrome',
    "chromeOptions": {
      'binary': "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Google\\Chrome Beta\\Application\\chrome.exe",
      args: [],
      extensions: [],
  }

Answer 2

It is issue with installation of Chrome on my Windows 10. Try to reinstall it on computer you got this issue.

If it will not solve the problem use Gecko driver and Firefox.

Answer 3

I found the problem. On my linux system, Google Chrome Browser was not installed.

I was under the impression that ChromeDriver binary has got a browser implementation in it. Now I realized that's wrong , ChromeDriver binary is a selenium wrapper that calls Google Chrome.

I must say that the exception message "selenium.WebDriverException: unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary" is confusing. If it was telling that "Chrome Browser is not installed" or something similar it would have been much easier.

Thanks George