[🐛 Bug]: Specifying default download directory for Chrome not working

[TAlvesInfo]

What happened?

Hi everyone,

I’m encountering an issue with ChromeDriver 133.0.6943.53 in my Selenium-based Java application (Spring Boot) running in Ubuntu environment. I wanted to see if anyone has faced a similar problem or has a potential solution.

Background:

I use Selenium with ChromeDriver to perform web scraping and resource downloads. Previously, I was using ChromeDriver 126.0.6478.126, but I encountered an issue where it left zombie processes that eventually crashed my system. Upgrading to version 133.0.6943.53 solved the zombie process issue, but now I’m facing a new problem: the download path I specify is ignored.

The Issue:

I need to handle multiple requests simultaneously, and the files being downloaded have the same name. To avoid conflicts, I assign each request a unique directory based on a GUID (requestId). However, with ChromeDriver 133, the browser downloads the files to the default system directory instead of the custom path I set.

What I've Tried:

Tried different ways to set the download path, but nothing seems to override the default behavior.

Question:

Has anyone experienced a similar issue with ChromeDriver 133? Is there a workaround to force Chrome to respect the download.default_directory setting?

Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

How can we reproduce the issue?

Current Configuration:

Here's my ChromeDriver instantiation method:


private ChromeDriver instantiateDriver(boolean headless) {
    ChromeOptions co = new ChromeOptions();
    co.addArguments("--disable-gpu", "--window-size=1920,1200", "--ignore-certificate-errors",
            "--disable-extensions", "--no-sandbox", "--disable-dev-shm-usage");

    if (headless) {
        co.addArguments("--headless",
                "--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
                "--window-size=1920x1080");
    }

    HashMap<String, Object> prefs = new HashMap<>();
    prefs.put("plugins.always_open_pdf_externally", true);
    prefs.put("download.default_directory", linuxPdfPath + requestId + "/");
    prefs.put("download.prompt_for_download", false);

    co.setExperimentalOption("prefs", prefs);

    ChromeDriver driver = null;
    try {
        driver = new ChromeDriver(co);
    } catch (SessionNotCreatedException e) {
        log.error("Driver encountered an issue during initialization...");
        log.error(LogEnum.FAILED.formatLog("instantiateDriver", e.getMessage()));
    }
    return 


Environment Details:

OS: Ubuntu

Selenium with Java (Spring Boot)

ChromeDriver: 133.0.6943.53

Chrome version matches the driver version

Headless mode is required

linuxPdfPath is set to "/var/servicepath/" and requestId is a GUID

Relevant log output

I don't have any errors being throw. My problem is that the download directory remains the default one instead of the one I'm trying to specify

Operating System

Ubuntu

Selenium version

Java 4.7.0

What are the browser(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

ChromeDriver 133.0.6943.53

What are the browser driver(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

ChromeDriver 133.0.6943.53

Are you using Selenium Grid?

No response

[github-actions]

@TAlvesInfo, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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Thank you!

[cgoldberg]

@TAlvesInfo

Can you try also setting the savefile.default_directory preference with the same directory path?

There are also some restrictions with downloading files when Chrome is in headless mode. You might need the following preferences:

"download_restrictions", 0
"safebrowsing.enabled", false,
"safebrowsing.disable_download_protection", true

Note: this is most likely a Chrome/ChromeDriver issue and not related to Selenium specifically.

[TAlvesInfo]

Hi @cgoldberg , thank you for the help, unfortunately that didn't work for me.
I've been trying with other options and the one that fixed the problem for me was doing this:

 HashMap<String, Object> prefs = new HashMap<String, Object>();
        
        prefs.put("plugins.always_open_pdf_externally", true);

        co.setExperimentalOption("prefs", prefs);

        ChromeDriver driver = null;
        try {
            driver = new ChromeDriver(co);

            Map<String, Object> commandParams = new HashMap<>();
            commandParams.put("behavior", "allow");
            commandParams.put("downloadPath", linuxPdfPath + requestId + "/");

            ((ChromeDriver) driver).executeCdpCommand("Page.setDownloadBehavior", commandParams);

        } catch (SessionNotCreatedException e) {
            log.error("driver had some problems initing...");
        }

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity since it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.