I’m trying to get Chrome running in headless mode on my macOS system but keep running into problems. Every time I try to execute my script, I get an error saying it cannot find the Chrome binary.
Here’s the code I’m using:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
browser_options = Options()
browser_options.add_argument("--headless")
web_driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=browser_options)
web_driver.get("https://www.example.com")
print("Headless Chrome started successfully")
The error I’m getting looks like this:
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary
(Driver info: chromedriver=2.36.540469, platform=Mac OS X 10.13.2 x86_64)
I used to work with PhantomJS but I know that’s deprecated now. Has anyone dealt with this Chrome binary issue before? What am I missing in my setup?
i actually had same prob last week. try updating your chromedriver first - thats usually the culprit. run brew install chromedriver if u have homebrew installed, it handles path stuff automaticaly. also double check chrome is in applications folder.
I encountered this exact issue when I switched from PhantomJS to Chrome headless on my Mac. The problem is that Selenium can’t locate your Chrome installation automatically. You need to explicitly specify the Chrome binary path in your options. Add this line before creating your webdriver instance: browser_options.binary_location = "/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome". Also make sure you have ChromeDriver installed and it’s compatible with your Chrome version. You can check your Chrome version in Chrome > About Google Chrome, then download the matching ChromeDriver from the official site. I keep mine in /usr/local/bin/ so it’s in my PATH. After doing this, your headless setup should work without the binary error.
That ChromeDriver version looks pretty outdated which might be causing compatibility issues with newer Chrome versions. When I had similar problems, the solution was making sure both Chrome and ChromeDriver were current versions. You can verify this by running chromedriver --version in terminal and comparing it with your Chrome version. Another thing that worked for me was setting the executable path directly in the webdriver call like webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='/path/to/chromedriver', options=browser_options). Sometimes the automatic detection fails even when everything seems properly installed. If you’re still having trouble, you might want to try using webdriver-manager package which handles the ChromeDriver management automatically and saves you from manual version matching headaches.