Opening Firefox via Selenium in Jenkins - python-3.x

Question

When trying to run a Python Selenium script via Jenkins, it crashes, with a very unhelpful exception - "selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: Process unexpectedly closed with status: 0"
The same Python script runs perfectly fine from outside Python.
I've reduced the script to a very, very basic one, simply launching Firefox -
from selenium import webdriver
if __name__ == "__main__":
print("Hello World")
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://www.google.com")
driver.maximize_window()
driver.quit()
print("Goodbye World")
Output from cmd prompt:
>C:\Users\kipod>C:\python_projects\Ranger\_just_open_browser.py
>Hello World
>Goodbye World
Works fine.
Running as a Jenkins job:
>##Started by user anonymous
>Building in workspace C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins\workspace\Second Test
>[Second Test] $ cmd /c call >C:\Users\kipod\AppData\Local\Temp\jenkins3557827225974274191.bat
>
>C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins\workspace\Second Test>python >C:\python_projects\Ranger\_just_open_browser.py
>Hello World
>Traceback (most recent call last):
> File "C:\python_projects\Ranger\_just_open_browser.py", line 8, in <module>
> driver = webdriver.Firefox()
> File "C:\Python\Python36-32\lib\site->packages\selenium\webdriver\firefox\webdriver.py", line 154, in __init__
> keep_alive=True)
> File "C:\Python\Python36-32\lib\site->packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 151, in __init__
> self.start_session(desired_capabilities, browser_profile)
> File "C:\Python\Python36-32\lib\site->packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 240, in start_session
> response = self.execute(Command.NEW_SESSION, parameters)
> File "C:\Python\Python36-32\lib\site->packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 308, in execute
> self.error_handler.check_response(response)
> File "C:\Python\Python36-32\lib\site->packages\selenium\webdriver\remote\errorhandler.py", line 194, in check_response
> **raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
>selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: Process unexpectedly >closed with status: 0**
>C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins\workspace\Second Test>exit 1
>Build step 'Execute Windows batch command' marked build as failure
>Finished: FAILURE
I suspect something is off with Jenkins's environment variables, but I have no idea what to check. And the exception is so unspecific ("I crashed. lols"), That I found nothing helpful on Google. And I've been searching for a while.
Versions:
Jenkins: 2.73.1
Python: 3.6.2
Geckodriver: 0.19.0
Selenium: 3.6.0
(Tried opening chrome instead of firefox - same behaviour.)

Answer 1

I think you need to run your python script using a jenkins slave configured to log on as a standard windows user account (for example "kipod") ? Make sure that auto login is set for the slave machine for the user account, in order to allow selenium to launch Firefox in a desktop.
Some documenation here: Step by step guide to set up master and slave machines on Windows