Python script with Selenium leaves firefox.exe running when manually closing application

Question

I have a simple script that runs on Selenium. I made an .exe file out of it and it works perfectly fine but there is one problem I have noticed. The .exe opens a console as intended but if I manually close the console while the script is running, it leaves firefox.exe opened in Processes tab.

My question is: how do I make Python close these processes in case if the script's execution has been interrupted manually?

I'm guessing I need to catch the exception, but what exception does Python throw in case if we manually stop the program?

Did you use `pyinstaller` to pack it? – jizhihaoSAMA Jul 17 '20 at 14:02 — jizhihaoSAMA, Jul 17 '20 at 14:02
Yes. I did use `pyinstaller`. – audrey sylvain fan account Jul 17 '20 at 14:05 — audrey sylvain fan account, Jul 17 '20 at 14:05

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 17 '20 at 14:12

Ideally, invoking quit() deletes the current instance of WebDriver variant and the current Browsing Context.

However, if you are manually interupting the script's execution by closing the console, the Browsing Context gets closed visually but numerous browser processes would still continue to consume CPU and memory

Solution

In those cases, you have to explicitly kill the Browser process and the WebDriver instances using either of the following solutions:

Java Solution(Windows):

import java.io.IOException;

public class Kill_ChromeDriver_GeckoDriver_IEDriverserver 
{
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception 
    {
        Runtime.getRuntime().exec("taskkill /F /IM geckodriver.exe /T");
        Runtime.getRuntime().exec("taskkill /F /IM chromedriver.exe /T");
        Runtime.getRuntime().exec("taskkill /F /IM IEDriverServer.exe /T");
    }
}

Python Solution (Windows):

import os
os.system("taskkill /f /im geckodriver.exe /T")
os.system("taskkill /f /im chromedriver.exe /T")
os.system("taskkill /f /im IEDriverServer.exe /T")

Python Solution(Cross Platform):

import os
import psutil

PROCNAME = "geckodriver" # or chromedriver or IEDriverServer
for proc in psutil.process_iter():
    # check whether the process name matches
    if proc.name() == PROCNAME:
        proc.kill()

References

You can find a couple of detailed discussions in:

Selenium : How to stop geckodriver process impacting PC memory, without calling driver.quit()?

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 17 '20 at 14:17

0

You could use atexit module to quit the webdriver automatically before the script stopped.

import atexit
from selenium import webdriver

def exit_handler(): # when exit, execute this function
    driver.quit()

atexit.register(exit_handler)

driver = webdriver.Firefox() 
# Your work

answered Jul 17 '20 at 14:17

jizhihaoSAMA

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I used `psutil` in my def `exit_handler` and it did not work, unfortunately... – audrey sylvain fan account Jul 20 '20 at 07:24
@audreysylvainfanaccount You don't need to use `psutil`...Have you tried `atexit`? – jizhihaoSAMA Jul 20 '20 at 12:55
Yeah, the `psutil` part was called via `def exit_handler` which was registered with `atexit` However, I did not try `driver.quit()` since I have no idea how to properly pass it from a thread yet, because drivers are being generated by `ThreadPoolExecutor().map()` – audrey sylvain fan account Jul 20 '20 at 13:27

Python script with Selenium leaves firefox.exe running when manually closing application

2 Answers2

Solution

References