Running ChromeDriver with Python selenium on Heroku

Question

So I have a Flask server on Heroku which has been working fine as expected for some time.Now, as per new requirements, I need to add functionality to the Flask server to fet

Answer 1

In your Heroku app go to Settings and add the following build packs:

• https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-chromedriver
• https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-google-chrome

In addition, in your Python script you have to set a few Chrome options so that your script runs on Heroku without error.

import time

from selenium import webdriver
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

gChromeOptions = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
gChromeOptions.add_argument("window-size=1920x1480")
gChromeOptions.add_argument("disable-dev-shm-usage")
gDriver = webdriver.Chrome(
    chrome_options=gChromeOptions, executable_path=ChromeDriverManager().install()
)
gDriver.get("https://www.python.org/")
time.sleep(3)
gDriver.save_screenshot("my_screenshot.png")
gDriver.close()

Here is a more detailed post that I created in case you are still having problems: https://www.jtrocinski.com/posts/Heroku-Use_Selenium_to_run_Google_Chrome_in_Python.html

Answer 2

I had the same issue and the following steps worked fine for me:

• I added the following buildpacks on heroku: https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-xvfb-google-chrome (to install chrome, since chromedriver requires it) and https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-chromedriver.
• I created an environment variable GOOGLE_CHROME_BIN, with the path of chrome on heroku: /app/.apt/usr/bin/google-chrome and an environment variable called CHROMEDRIVER_PATH with the path of chromedriver on heroku: /app/.chromedriver/bin/chromedriver.

• In my python file, I configured chromedriver:

  chrome_options = Options()
  chrome_options.binary_location = GOOGLE_CHROME_BIN
  chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')
  chrome_options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
  driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=CHROMEDRIVER_PATH, chrome_options=chrome_options)
  

(First, I tried to configure chromedriver with no arguments, but I faced the following error: "Chrome failed to start: crashed". --disable-gpu and --no-sandbox solved the problem for me).