java - Selenium Chromedriver server times out despite being available

Question

I have a Java Selenium project that will not run on my machine, but does run on coworkers' machines with the same OS version (OSX 10.13.1), Chrome browser version (63.0.3239.84), and chromedriver version (2.34). I get the message:

Starting ChromeDriver 2.34.522932 (4140ab217e1ca1bec0c4b4d1b148f3361eb3a03e) on port 18633
Only local connections are allowed.

org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: Timed out waiting for driver server to start.
Build info: version: '3.8.1', revision: '6e95a6684b', time: '2017-12-01T18:33:54.468Z'
System info: host: 'localhost', ip: 'fe80:0:0:0:1cc9:e0ab:f4e5:dd34%en0', os.name: 'Mac OS X', os.arch: 'x86_64', os.version: '10.13.1', java.version: '1.8.0_20'
Driver info: driver.version: ChromeDriver
...
Caused by: org.openqa.selenium.net.UrlChecker$TimeoutException: Timed out waiting for [http://localhost:18633/status] to be available after 20005 ms
    at org.openqa.selenium.net.UrlChecker.waitUntilAvailable(UrlChecker.java:100)
    at org.openqa.selenium.remote.service.DriverService.waitUntilAvailable(DriverService.java:187)
    ... 28 more
Caused by: java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.get(FutureTask.java:205)
    at com.google.common.util.concurrent.SimpleTimeLimiter.callWithTimeout(SimpleTimeLimiter.java:149)
    at org.openqa.selenium.net.UrlChecker.waitUntilAvailable(UrlChecker.java:75)
    ... 29 more

however when I open http://localhost:18633/status in my browser I get a valid response:

{"sessionId":"","status":0,"value":{"build":{"version":"alpha"},"os":{"arch":"x86_64","name":"Mac OS X","version":"10.13.1"}}}

I've tried swapping out chromedriver binaries, but I'm not really sure what else to do. I get similar issues with geckodriver, but that may or may not be the same issue. I have also tried creating a new user on my system and running it from that account, to account for user settings - No luck.

What am I missing here? What info would be helpful to debug this problem?

Answer 1

The error says it all :

org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: Timed out waiting for driver server to start.

Clearly indicates the WebDriver instance didn't get initiated. Hence Driver info is left blank as :

Driver info: driver.version: ChromeDriver

Which inturn produces the error:

org.openqa.selenium.net.UrlChecker$TimeoutException

and

java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException

---

It would be tough to guess the actual reason without any visibility of your code block but in general we can solve this by downloading the ChromeDriver binary from this repository and passing the absolute path of the ChromeDriver while initializing the WebDriver instance as follows :

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "/path/to/chromedriver");
driver = new ChromeDriver();

---

Key Points :

• Always use the latest version of the Selenium Client and ChromeDriver binaries.
• Always keep the automatic updates for the browser enabled.
• Always keep the JDK version updated (the current version being JDK 8u241)