Ruby / Heroku Selenium::WebDriver::Error::WebDriverError: unable to connect to chromedriver 127.0.0.1:9516

Question

I'm trying to run headless chrome on Heroku with ruby. I've installed the buildpacks https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-google-chrome/ and https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-chromedriver and have set the Selenium driver_path to the correct location (I've checked this as before setting the Selenium driver path I get cannot find Chrome binary, after setting it to the GOOGLE_CHROME_BIN variable set by the buildpack I get the unable to connect to chromedriver).

When I try to start Selenium / Watir with Watir::Browser.new :chrome or Watir::Browser.new :chrome, headless:true I get Selenium::WebDriver::Error::WebDriverError: unable to connect to chromedriver 127.0.0.1:9516

Any suggestions are appreciated

Answer 1

We also had the same problem due to the combination of configuration errors and passing the correct options hash to Watir::Browser.new. We are using watir (6.10.3), selenium-webdriver (~> 3.4, >= 3.4.1) and ruby '2.4.0'.

To get everything working on Heroku we added the following buildpacks:

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

To successfully initialize the browser you need to pass the path to chromedriver bin within the options hash. heroku-buildpack-chromedriver provides an environment variable GOOGLE_CHROME_SHIM for the bin search path. At the end the code which will work locally and on Heroku looks like this:

opts = {
    headless: true
}

if (chrome_bin = ENV.fetch('GOOGLE_CHROME_SHIM', nil))
  opts.merge!( options: {binary: chrome_bin})
end 

browser = Watir::Browser.new :chrome, opts
browser.goto "your url"

Answer 2

If anyone else stumbles across this, there's a good example here: https://github.com/jormon/minimal-chrome-on-heroku