Unable to discover proper chromedriver version in offline mode in Docker Web App (Azure)

Question

I'm running a web app on Azure from a Docker container based on a Selenium image (selenium/standalone-chrome:latest). It ran perfectly fine, but out of nowhere (after changing something unrelated in the data handling section separate from my scraper) started giving me the following error: "Unable to discover proper chromedriver version in offline mode".

The weird thing is that my API is still running fine online; I can get and post requests and from my logs I can see they're received and handled properly up until the chromedriver is initiated (which fails).

The error occurs here during the instantiation of the driver:

# import chromedriver_binary
from selenium.webdriver import Chrome, ChromeOptions

def _GetDriver() -> Chrome:
    options = ChromeOptions()
    options.add_argument("--headless")
    options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')
    options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')

return Chrome(options=options)  # <--- Error happens here.

def _EnrichAtomicAddress(info: dict) -> dict:
    with _GetDriver() as driver:  # <--- Only place _GetDriver is called.
        data = XXXXXX(driver, info)
        data['lastScrapedDate'] = date.today()
        data['retrievalDate'] = date.today()

        if 'errorMessage' in data:
            return data

        data.update(XXXXX(driver, data))

return data

My Dockerfile:

FROM selenium/standalone-chrome:latest

LABEL authors="Robert"

# Set the working directory to /app
WORKDIR /app

# Copy the current directory contents into the container at /app
COPY . /app

# Install any needed packages specified in requirements.txt
RUN sudo apt-get install -y python3

RUN sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y python3-pip

RUN sudo pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt

# Ports
EXPOSE 443
EXPOSE 80

# Define environment variable
ENV FLASK_APP function_app.py

# Run the Flask app
# CMD ["flask", "run", "--host=0.0.0.0"]
CMD ["flask", "run"]
# ENTRYPOINT ["top", "-b"]`

I've tried:

• different selenium image versions;
• different selenium images (chrome, edge, firfox, etc) also changing the corresponding webdriver instantiation in Python;
• including my own chromedriver via the Python package chromedriver-binary;
• removing all the chrome options I have set for in _GetDriver();
• reverting the unrelated code chance;
• pinging google.com from inside my API, which works showing my API can still partially access the internet

yet to no avail.

What is causing this and how can I fix this? Thanks in advance! <3

Answer 1

Docker selenium automatically defines the mode to be offline according to the source.

Variable:

SE_OFFLINE="true" \