Unable to launch the Chromium browser via Puppeteer on Ubuntu 22.04 after a reboot (unless ssh'ing in first - then it works)

Mehmet

12/9/23, 11:09 AM

please help me out here.

I have a fresh ubuntu server 22.04 setup with node (v18.12.1) / express, and PM2 as the process manager.

I have Puppeteer installed and the Chromium browser, which is working fine. I use it to generate high quality PNG files for personal use.

The problem is, when I reboot the server, PM2 successfully starts the node app, so my website is accessible. I can successfully ping it and get a response, so the web app is working fine after a reboot.

The problem is that (after a reboot) Puppeteer is unable to launch the browser if I send a request to my web app and say, hey, give me a screenshot of this. I get the following error:

Error: Failed to launch the browser process!
/usr/bin/chromium-browser: 12: xdg-settings: not found
2022/12/08 00:36:47.167545 cmd_run.go:1055: WARNING: cannot start document portal: dial unix 
/run/user/1001/bus: connect: no such file or directory
/system.slice/pm2-sammy.service is not a snap cgroup

Now, say I reboot the server, and ssh into it as the user sammy (which everything is installed and should be running as - pm2 startup saved in user /home.sammy etc.) and if I ask for the same screenshot, now everything is working as expected.

It looks like merely ssh'ing into the server triggers something then everything is working fine. I can't figure out what I'm missing. By the way, I've got this working fine on a local Vagrant machine.

I think on reboot there is no session running under the user sammy hence it works after ssh'ing in because a session is started?

1329

1 + 0

server

reboot

chromium

Score:4

Ubuntu

Mehmet

12/9/23, 11:50 AM

Ok guys, I've found the solution. I'll post it as an answer in case it helps someone out there.

I had to enable user lingering.

loginctl enable-linger sammy

A quick explanation from Google:

What does enable linger do?
Enable/disable user lingering for one or more users. If enabled for a specific 
user, a user manager is spawned for the user at boot and kept around after 
logouts. This allows users who are not logged in to run long-running services.

I am now able launch the chromium browser via puppeteer straight after a reboot of the server without the need of ssh'ing in first.

+ 3

msonowal

1/19/24, 4:07 PM

awesome you saved my day

threehappypenguins

3/23/24, 6:05 PM

Yessssss. Thank you! I was banging my head trying to figure out why I couldn't get Puppeteer to run on its own (was using pm2), and user lingering was it. I tried specifying the browser path, no sandbox, you name it. User lingering was the problem exactly.

Caedmon

8/10/24, 1:39 PM

Amazing - this did the trick for me after a morning of fruitless experimenting! I found puppeteer was failing if I wasn't logged in via SSH, unless I'd started PM2 myself and not automatically on reboot.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Unable to launch the Chromium browser via Puppeteer on Ubuntu 22.04 after a reboot (unless ssh'ing in first - then it works)

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