ChromeDriver Is Assuming That Chrome Has Crashed When Passing Profile Arguments

If any Chrome processes are running and the following code is run, Stack Overflow will NEVER load: options = webdriver.ChromeOptions() options.add_argument('user-data-dir=C:\\Users

Solution 1:

I'm not sure it is the same user-data-dir, but a different profile will lead to conflicts. I always use another user-data-dir with scripts.

-- But seeing your case I guess it is so.

Also BTW, to make life easier, why not just copy to some shorter directory address? --- say "C:\ChromeUserData".

And if you don't care about the old settings, you just specify user-data-dir to a new location. And Chrome will create the profile and things for you. (The directory specified needs to exist.)

For example:

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("--user-data-dir=D:\\chromedriver\\UserDataDir") #Path to your chrome user-data/profile
options.add_argument('--disable-infobars') #disable the automation prompt bar
options.add_argument('--lang=en') #Set language to English
w = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="D:\\chromedriver\\chromedriver.exe", chrome_options=options)

Given that D:\chromedriver\UserDataDir exists (or you create it first) and chromedriver.exe is at D:\chromedriver\chromedriver.exe.

By this way, you don't need to specify profile-directory any more. The script will create and use Default directory/profile inside D:\\chromedriver\\UserDataDir and save any changes you made.

Another tip: You can put chromedriver.exe in the directory of python.exe, thus to save the needs to specify executable_path, also will have fewer possible errors.

To make it more reliable, you can put these before above code snippets:

import os
uddPath = 'D:\\chromedriver\\UserDataDir'
if not os.path.exists(uddPath):
    os.makedirs(uddPath)

Solution 2:

Okay so the fix is to go to C:\Users\NAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome and duplicate your "User Data" folder and give it another name. Then just set your "user-data-dir" argument to the new folder.

# set up the chrome options to launch with the AUTO profile
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("user-data-dir=C:\\Users\\RvBVakama\\AppData\\Local\\Google\\Chrome\\User Data AUTO")
options.add_argument('--profile-directory=Profile 1')
# start chrome with the driver
w = webdriver.Chrome('C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Chrome/Application/chromedriver.exe', options=options)