I am trying to use robotframework to drive Chromium in Kubuntu 24.04. I can get it to open the browser, but not to interact with it in any way past that point.
I am setting up my development environment as below:
python -m venv autolab
source autolab/bin/activate
pip install robotframework robotframework-seleniumlibrary
Chromium is installed as an Ubuntu snap.
After that I try the following test cases:
*** Settings ***
Documentation Open Chromium on a given URL.
Library SeleniumLibrary
*** Test Cases ***
interact with browser
open browser https://robotframework.org Chrome
location should be https://robotframework.org
*** Settings ***
Documentation Use ChromeDriver to open Chromium on a given URL.
Library SeleniumLibrary
*** Test Cases ***
interact with browser
create webdriver Chrome
go to http://robotframework.org
location should be https://robotframework.org
In both cases Chromium opens, however the URL bar is set to data:, and stays that way until I close the browser. No errors are reported until I close the browser. The console output for the first test case (the second is just the same with a different name) is as below:
$ robot open-chromium.robot
==============================================================================
Open-Chromium :: Open Chromium on a given URL.
==============================================================================
interact with browser | FAIL |
SessionNotCreatedException: Message: session not created: Chrome failed to start: exited normally.
(session not created: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist)
(The process started from chrome location /usr/bin/chromium-browser is no longer running, so ChromeDriver is assuming that Chrome has crashed.)
...
What's going on?
It turns out that ChromeDriver had to be installed from the package manager:
sudo apt install chromium-chromedriver
After running the command above both test cases work as expected.