How to fix common Laravel Dusk problems

Every time I've updated Laravel Homestead or started a new environment, I've had problems running Laravel Dusk. These are solutions for the most common problems.

Note that these solutions are not mine, they were found mostly on StackOverflow. However, there are many questions and answers out there and not all of them worked for me. These solutions have not failed me once so they might help you out too.

Failed to connect

The error message:

Failed to connect to localhost port 9515: Connection refused

SSH into Homestead. If you call the chrome driver directly using vendor/laravel/dusk/bin/chromedriver-linux, you should see this message.

error while loading shared libraries: libnss3.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Install missing libnss3 and chromium-browser packages with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y libnss3 chromium-browser

Chromium version mismatch

The error message:

Facebook\WebDriver\Exception\SessionNotCreatedException: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 76
  (Driver info: chromedriver=76.0.3809.68 (420c9498db8ce8fcd190a954d51297672c1515d5-refs/branch-heads/3809@{#864}),platform=Linux 4.15.0-55-generic x86_64)

*** Update:
Laravel now ships with an easy command to fix this problem. Just run php artisan dusk:chrome-driver --detect and it will automatically install the correct driver version.

If you don't have access to this artisan command, the following might work for you:
*** End of update

SSH into Homestead. Check what major version of chromium-browser is installed by running chromium-browser --version, e.g. 75

Now install this version of the dusk chrome-driver with php artisan dusk:chrome-driver 75

Hope this solved your problem too. I've only tested these solutions on Laravel Homestead but they might apply to other setups. Leave me a comment if you have questions or suggestions.

Comments (3)

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Thanks. This helped me get dusk working again.
Awesome, thanks so much for writing this up!
The "connection refused" advice worked perfectly for me. Thanks!