WebDriverException: Service U:/Scraping/chromedriver.exe unexpectedly exited. Status code was: 1 while working with Chrome and Python

Question

I've been trying to get the webdriver to work with Python in Chrome at work, but can't for the life of me figure out what's wrong, despite troubleshooting for most of the day.

I've unzipped chromedriver to the folder I'm working in. I've tried using the executable_path argument with chromedriver. I've tried updating the options within chromedriver to direct to the Chrome.exe file.

Code is below. Pretty straightforward. 'url' has an address from earlier in the code that I'm not including here - the script doesn't even make it that far anyways.

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path = 'U:/Scraping/chromedriver.exe')
driver.get(url)

And the error:

    Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<ipython-input-67-db2ce2aa7cdf>", line 1, in <module>
    runfile('U:/Scraping/Project.py', wdir='U:/Scraping')

  File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\spyder\utils\site\sitecustomize.py", line 705, in runfile
    execfile(filename, namespace)

  File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\spyder\utils\site\sitecustomize.py", line 102, in execfile
    exec(compile(f.read(), filename, 'exec'), namespace)

  File "U:/Scraping/Project.py", line 14, in <module>
    driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path = 'U:/Scraping/chromedriver.exe')

  File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\chrome\webdriver.py", line 68, in __init__
    self.service.start()

  File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\common\service.py", line 98, in start
    self.assert_process_still_running()

  File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\common\service.py", line 111, in assert_process_still_running
    % (self.path, return_code)

WebDriverException: Service U:/Scraping/chromedriver.exe unexpectedly exited. Status code was: 1

Answer 1

Same error here. My issue was that I had chromedriver.exe on a company sharedrive. Some firewall or security setting was presumably preventing python from accessing the executable file in that remote location.

I made chromedriver.exe local and it worked.