selenium with google colab

Question

Anyone working with Selenium in Google Colab has had trouble since yesterday, before 16hrs (UTC)

The code sample below was working all day long, but after lunchtime, it began to crash.

SessionNotCreatedException: Message: session not created: Chrome instance exited,

when driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chrome_options), before that time, everything was working sweet. The driver verbose log doesn't contain anything

thx is advance

code sample

#without output adapted to kaggle 
# =========================================
# STEP 1 — INSTALL DEPENDENCIES
# =========================================
!apt-get update -qq
!apt-get install -qq chromium-chromedriver
!pip install -q selenium tabulate ipywidgets pillow pandas requests openpyxl

# =========================================
# STEP 2 — IMPORTS
# =========================================
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait, Select
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium.common.exceptions import StaleElementReferenceException, TimeoutException
from google.colab import files
from IPython.display import display, clear_output
import ipywidgets as widgets
import pandas as pd
import requests, time
from datetime import datetime
import re
from os.path import join
import time
import IPython
import os

# =========================================
# STEP 3 — DRIVER CONFIGURATION
# =========================================
chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")
chrome_options.add_argument("--no-sandbox")
chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage")
chrome_options.add_argument("--window-size=1920,1080")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chrome_options)
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 15)
url = "https://opcoes.net.br/opcoes/bovespa/AMBP3"
driver.get(url)
time.sleep(2)

SessionNotCreatedException: Message: session not created: Chrome instance exited update the question with the complete error stacktrace. — undetected Selenium
– undetected Selenium, Commented Nov 12 at 12:56
always put full error message (traceback) because there are other useful information. — furas
– furas, Commented Nov 12 at 13:55
ad info Stacktrace: #0 0x578cd809532a <unknown> #1 0x578cd7ae1e4b <unknown> #2 0x578cd7b1c919 <unknown> #3 0x578cd7b18375 <unknown> #4 0x578cd7b69016 <unknown> #5 0x578cd7b68736 <unknown> #6 0x578cd7b26c1a <unknown> #7 0x578cd7b27921 <unknown> #8 0x578cd805c239 <unknown> #9 0x578cd805f1e8 <unknown> #10 0x578cd80454c9 <unknown> #11 0x578cd805fdb5 <unknown> #12 0x578cd802ce93 <unknown> #13 0x578cd8082098 <unknown> #14 0x578cd8082273 <unknown> #15 0x578cd80942c3 <unknown> #16 0x799f4bc81ac3 <unknown> — John Jairo Sanabria Sarmiento
– John Jairo Sanabria Sarmiento, Commented Nov 13 at 4:53
the crash (with original code) is just on google collab, kaggle works fine adjusting the internet setting (kaggle disabled it by default). the problem was inform to colab team, they oriented to reinstall manually driver and check compatibility...it wasnt the "final" solution — John Jairo Sanabria Sarmiento
– John Jairo Sanabria Sarmiento, Commented Nov 17 at 8:53

furas · Accepted Answer · 2025-11-18 20:10:32Z

answer to my question..after multiples tentative for solving it. One finally works.

The code works on google colab and kaggle notebooks (kaggle needs login and turning internet on (disabled by default)

adjusting answer:

added steps

Uninstall chromium-browser if it was installed by default or previously
Install google-chrome-stable
import os, requests, zipfile, io
Get the installed Chrome browser version
Dynamically get ChromeDriver download URL from Chrome for Testing API
Fetch the list of known good versions from the Chrome for Testing API
Find the latest stable ChromeDriver for the detected major version
Enable, Move and extract dynamically the extracted_folder

code below

# =========================================
# STEP 1 — INSTALL DEPENDENCIES & DRIVER CONFIGURATION
# =========================================
!apt-get update -qq
# Uninstall chromium-browser if it was installed by default or previously
!apt-get remove -y chromium-browser > /dev/null 2>&1
# Install google-chrome-stable
!wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add -
!echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list
!apt-get update -qq
!apt-get install -qq google-chrome-stable
!pip install -q selenium tabulate ipywidgets pillow pandas requests openpyxl

import os
import requests
import zipfile
import io
import re # Import re module
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait

# Get the installed Chrome browser version
try:
    chrome_version_output = os.popen('google-chrome --version').read()
    chrome_version_match = re.search(r'Google Chrome (\d+)', chrome_version_output)
    if not chrome_version_match:
        # Fallback to chromium-browser if google-chrome version not found
        chrome_version_output = os.popen('chromium-browser --version').read()
        chrome_version_match = re.search(r'Chromium (\d+)', chrome_version_output)

    if chrome_version_match:
        chrome_major_version = chrome_version_match.group(1)
        print(f"Detected Chrome major version: {chrome_major_version}")
    else:
        raise ValueError("Could not determine Chrome major version.")
except Exception as e:
    print(f"Error detecting Chrome version: {e}")
    # Default to a known good version if detection fails in Colab
    chrome_major_version = "123" # A common version in Colab, adjust if needed
    print(f"Defaulting to Chrome major version: {chrome_major_version}")

# Dynamically get ChromeDriver download URL from Chrome for Testing API
chromedriver_url = None
try:
    # Fetch the list of known good versions from the Chrome for Testing API
    response = requests.get("https://googlechromelabs.github.io/chrome-for-testing/known-good-versions-with-downloads.json")
    response.raise_for_status()
    versions_data = response.json()

    # Find the latest stable ChromeDriver for the detected major version
    for version_info in reversed(versions_data['versions']):
        if version_info['version'].startswith(f"{chrome_major_version}."):
            for download in version_info['downloads']['chromedriver']:
                if download['platform'] == 'linux64':
                    chromedriver_url = download['url']
                    break
        if chromedriver_url:
            break

    if not chromedriver_url:
        raise ValueError(f"Could not find ChromeDriver download URL for Chrome major version {chrome_major_version}")

    print(f"Downloading ChromeDriver from: {chromedriver_url}")
    response = requests.get(chromedriver_url)
    response.raise_for_status() # Raise an exception for bad status codes

    with zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(response.content)) as z:
        z.extractall("/tmp/") # Extract to a temporary directory

    # Move chromedriver to /usr/bin and make it executable
    # The extracted folder name might vary, so find it dynamically
    extracted_folder = [f for f in os.listdir('/tmp') if 'chromedriver' in f and os.path.isdir(os.path.join('/tmp', f))][0]
    !mv /tmp/{extracted_folder}/chromedriver /usr/bin/chromedriver
    !chmod +x /usr/bin/chromedriver
    print("✅ ChromeDriver downloaded and configured.")
except Exception as e:
    print(f"❌ Error downloading or configuring ChromeDriver: {e}")
    print("Please check the Chrome version and the corresponding ChromeDriver download URL.")
    raise # Re-raise to halt execution if setup fails

# =========================================
# STEP 2 — IMPORTS
# =========================================
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait, Select
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium.common.exceptions import StaleElementReferenceException, TimeoutException
import ipywidgets as widgets
from IPython.display import display, clear_output, HTML
import pandas as pd
import requests, time, os, re
from datetime import datetime

# =========================================
# STEP 3 — DRIVER CONFIGURATION
# =========================================
chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")
chrome_options.add_argument("--no-sandbox")
chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage")
chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-gpu") # Added for stability in headless mode
chrome_options.add_argument("--window-size=1920,1080")

# Configure ChromeDriver service with the now-installed chromedriver
service = Service(executable_path="/usr/bin/chromedriver")

driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=service, options=chrome_options)
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 15)
print("✅ Selenium WebDriver initialized.")

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