python - Selenium on MAC, Message: 'chromedriver' executable may have wrong permissions

Question

I'm just trying to do something very basic on my Mac using selenium and I can't even open a webpage. I'm getting an error of :

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/godsinred/Desktop/InstagramLiker/GmailAccountGenerator.py", line 10, in <module>
    driver = webdriver.Chrome()
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.6/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/chrome/webdriver.py", line 68, in __init__
    self.service.start()
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.6/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/common/service.py", line 88, in start
    os.path.basename(self.path), self.start_error_message)
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'chromedriver' executable may have wrong permissions. Please see https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/home

Here is my code below:

from selenium import webdriver
import time

link = "https://accounts.google.com"
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get(link)
time.sleep(5)

driver.quit()

Answer 1

Most answers here and in other related posts suggest users to just move the file to /usr/bin and they work fine if you are just running chromedriver locally and normally.

However, if you are compiling Python scripts into executables using compilers such as cx_freeze, you may not be able to afford the luxury if your program always uses a relative link to chromedriver.

As the error message suggests, your compiled program does not have the permissions to manipulate chromedriver. To use a relative link to chromedriver on a Mac in your compiled Python program, you can programmatically change the permission of chromedriver in your Python script using:

import os
os.chmod('/path/to/chromedriver', 0755) # e.g. os.chmod('/Users/user/Documents/my_project/chromedriver', 0755)

---

You can test this by doing the following:

1. cd to your working directory

2. $ chmod 755 chromedriver to allow your program to manipulate it

P.S. 755 is the default numerical permission for files in usr/bin. 664 is the default numerical permission for files in other normal folders (probably your working directory). Thus, when chromedriver complains it does not have the correct permission, you need to grant it a numerical permission equivalent to or greater than 755.