Selenium-manager.exe window popping up

While trying to setup a headless browser using selenium a console window pops up briefly before it closes, it's not the chromedriver.exe window cause that's handled by CREATE_NO_WINDOW the window is called selenium-manager.exe.

It only pops up when I build my script into an executable with Pyinstaller cause when I run it normally with Python it doesn't appear. The command I used was pyinstaller --windowed my_script.py, I also tried adding --noconsole and using noconsole alone but nothing worked. What could be causing this and how do I fix it?

Operation System: Windows-10-10.0.19045-SP0, Python: 3.11.1, Selenium: 4.10.0, Pyinstaller: 5.13.0

from subprocess import CREATE_NO_WINDOW
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver import Chrome, ChromeOptions

def setup_options(options: ChromeOptions) -> ChromeOptions :
    options.add_argument('--headless=new')
    options.add_argument('--disable-extensions')
    options.add_argument('--disable-infobars')
    options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
    return options

def setup_driver() -> Chrome:
    service_chrome = Service()
    service_chrome.creation_flags = CREATE_NO_WINDOW
    options = setup_options(ChromeOptions())
    return Chrome(service=service_chrome, options=options)

driver = setup_driver()
# Do some automated work
driver.quit()

Here's a screenshot of the window:

Hacky fix, navigate to the following path in your virtual environment ".venv\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\common\selenium_manager.py".

Within the script, there's a method called run in the SeleniumManager class that starts a subprocess that executes the selenium-manager.exe they made an over-sight and assumed everyone would be running their scripts in a console environment or maybe didn't consider windows users, so when making the call to subprocess.run they didn't add creationflags=CREATE_NO_WINDOW.

Edit it as follows

            if sys.platform == "win32":
                completed_proc = subprocess.run(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE, creationflags=subprocess.CREATE_NO_WINDOW)
            else: 
                completed_proc = subprocess.run(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

Note that the bug is only present in windows. They'll probably address it in the next updates. I made merged pull request with the fix.

We can avoid this by referring to the Chromedriver explicitly when starting the Chromeservice.

In this example, I found the path needs to be an absolute path, not a relative one. Maybe you can probably get it to work with a relative path

from subprocess import CREATE_NO_WINDOW
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver import Chrome, ChromeOptions

import sys
import os

def get_path(relative_path):
    """ Get the absolute path to the resource, works for dev and for PyInstaller """
    try:
        # PyInstaller creates a temp folder and stores path in _MEIPASS
        base_path = sys._MEIPASS
    except Exception:
        base_path = os.path.abspath(".")
    return os.path.join(base_path, relative_path)

def setup_options(options: ChromeOptions) -> ChromeOptions:
    options.add_argument('--headless=new')
    options.add_argument('--disable-extensions')
    options.add_argument('--disable-infobars')
    options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
    return options


def setup_driver() -> Chrome:
    service_chrome = Service((get_path('C:/absolute/path/to/driver/chromedriver.exe')))
    service_chrome.creation_flags = CREATE_NO_WINDOW
    options = setup_options(ChromeOptions())
    return Chrome(service=service_chrome, options=options)


driver = setup_driver()
# Do some automated work
driver.quit()