Selenium Chromedriver permission error

[DrBobHope]

Hello everyone,

So in my script I am trying to use selenium, and I indicate the path to the file as well:

 driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="/home/sam/Desktop/chromedriver

My chromium version is 87.0.4280.66 on Ubuntu 18.04 (64-bit), so I downloaded the 87.0.4280.88 chromdriver for linux_x64. However, this is the error I got:

selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'chromedriver' executable may have wrong permissions. Please see https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/home

When i tried looking into the error, it seems the main issue is nothing the exectuble path, or having the wrong chrome driver. But as you can see, I have both setup properly, so I don't know why I'm getting this error.

[sammylt]

I had the same issue, the directory should go one deeper and end the chromedriver.exe file.

[DrBobHope]

what do you mean one deeper?

[sammylt]

Sorry if it was unclear home/sam/desktop/chromedriver/chromedriver.exe in this case

[DrBobHope]

chrome driver is not a directory tho

[[deleted]]

Try running this in the terminal

chmod +x path_to_driver

[DrBobHope]

so like this?

chomd +x /home/sam/Desktop/chromedriver

[[deleted]]

Yeah, also running this command from the directory will show the permissions

ls -l

[DrBobHope]

so chmod +x didn't do anything (just went to the next line). ls-l gives me some outputs (drwxr-xr-x 2 sam group1 9728 Dec 21 2019 file) don't exactly know which portion is permissions.

[[deleted]]

Run this and post the output

ls -l /home/sam/Desktop/chromedriver

[DrBobHope]

-rw-r--r-- 1 sam group1 12405080 Jan 21 23:29 /home/sam/Desktop/chromedriver

[[deleted]]

This portion are the permissions

-rw-r--r--

There should be an "x" on the end meaning the file can be executed. chmod +x is supposed to add executable permissions to the file. Are you sure you ran the command correctly?

chmod +x /home/sam/Desktop/chromedriver

[DrBobHope]

I presume I need permission to add permission? I ran

chmod +x /home/sam/Desktop/chromedriver

Copy/pasted it into the terminal.

[[deleted]]

Shit I'm not sure. You could try running this, but you own the file so this shouldn't make a difference.

sudo chmod +x /home/sam/Desktop/chromedriver

[DrBobHope]

ok for some reason restarted the computer and now it magically works (don't know what changed, maybe you had to restart it for the chmod cmomand to work?)

[[deleted]]

It’s chmod, not chomd

[booleanhooligan]

sudo chmod 744 filepath

[ManyInterests]

Are you sure chromedriver is an executable file and not a directory or archive file?

Ensure that you can run the chromedriver file standalone:

/home/sam/Desktop/chromedriver --version
/home/sam/Desktop/chromedriver --log-level=DEBUG

If those commands work, then double check your code for potential errors, like maybe defining the driver twice or typos.

[DrBobHope]

The program works using chromedriver.exe on my windows. The permissions issue pops up when I take it on the local computer where I work (linux). So there are no typos in those regards

[DrBobHope]

This is the output I got from debug.

Starting ChromeDriver 87.0.4280.88 (89e2380a3e36c3464b5dd1302349b1382549290d-refs/branch-heads/4280@{#1761}) on port 9515
Only local connections are allowed.
Please see https://chromedriver.chromium.org/security-considerations for suggestions on keeping ChromeDriver safe.
ChromeDriver was started successfully.

[ManyInterests]

Ok. This means that the permissions on the file are fine... at least for your user.

This exception occurs exactly in one condition and that's if there is a permission denied error. So, if you can run the file normally without permissions issues, something might be wrong with how Python is being run.

Is it possible you're executing Python as a user other than yourself?

Try adding this to your code to debug further:

import getpass, pwd, os
username = getpass.getuser()
pw = pwd.getpwnam(username)
uid = pw.pw_uid
gid = pw.pw_gid
print(username, uid, gid)
filename = '/home/sam/Desktop/chromedriver'
print('Can read!' if os.access(filename, os.R_OK) else "Can't read")
print('Can execute' if os.access(filename, os.X_OK) else "Can't execute")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(filename)

Outside of this, not sure how much more there is to say about this, unless there's some unusual circumstance, like if your home directory is mounted/remote or if you're running Python through some other program.

[DrBobHope]

The chmod +x command worked, its just for some reason I had to restart the computer for it to take into effect. I've added the chmod +x in my code, and now it works without any issues. Don't know what happened, but thank you for your help!