no such element: Unable to locate element using chromedriver and Selenium in production environment

Question

I have a problem with selenium chromedriver which I cannot figure out what\'s causing it. Some weeks ago everything was working OK, and suddenly this error started to show u

Answer 1

Whenever I encounter strange issues in Selenium like this, I prefer retrying to find the particular element which is causing intermittent troubles. One way is to wrap it around a try-except block:

try:
   sidebar = browser.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="sidebar"]/ul/li[1]/a')
except NoSuchElementException:
   time.sleep(10)
   print("Unable to find element in first time, trying it again")
   sidebar = browser.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="sidebar"]/ul/li[1]/a')

You could also put the try code in a loop with a suitable count variable to make the automation code work. (Check this). In my experience with JAVA, this idea has resolved multiple issues.