"A headless Firefox is already running"

[olleharstedt]

I get

A headless Firefox is already running

after starting browsh, quitting with ctrl-q and then starting it again.

[tombh]

What OS is that on? It's probably the fact that after closing Browsh it didn't manage to correctly quit the accompanying headless Firefox process. So you can probably do something like: kill $(ps aux|grep headless|tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f2)

But of course I need to fix the fact that Firefox didn't get closed after your first CTRL+q. If it keeps happening can you run browsh with the -debug arg and paste the output of ./debug.log here. Thank you.

[olleharstedt]

Xubuntu. Note that I'm also running selenium with headless Firefox in the background for my test suits. Will try the debug mode.

[olleharstedt]

Hm, hard to reproduce the issue...

[tombh]

Ah! Ok, the test for a detecting an existing Firefox is actually very crude at the moment. It just detects any headless Firefox, so they'll definitely by a false positive with your selenium session. Ok, then I know how to fix that. Added a new issue for that #61.

[olleharstedt]

👍

[olleharstedt]

Tip: Save the pid of the correct Firefox process. ;)

[tombh]

Haha, doh! Yes of course :D

[puthre]

Same issue here, however I see that the headless firefox started by browsh is still running
1035612 ? Sl 0:02 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox --marionette --headless --profile /home/puthre/.config/browsh/firefox_profile 1035663 ? Sl 0:00 \_ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 1 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 1 -prefMapSize 226319 -parentBuildID 20201108180448 -appdir /usr/lib/firefox/browser 1035612 true tab 1035723 ? Sl 0:00 \_ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 2 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 6480 -prefMapSize 226319 -parentBuildID 20201108180448 -appdir /usr/lib/firefox/browser 1035612 true tab 1035772 ? Sl 0:00 \_ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 3 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 8682 -prefMapSize 226319 -parentBuildID 20201108180448 -appdir /usr/lib/firefox/browser 1035612 true tab

It happened again a few times, after I received
"read tcp 127.0.0.1:3334->127.0.0.1:44356: read: connection reset by peer"

[buzzdan]

happens to me as well...

[basbebe]

+1, macOS 11

[shmup]

+1, Fedora 36

[profitrollgame]

+1, Debian 11

[hussam-qasem]

+1, CentOS 7.9

[martin-braun]

@tombh Please re-open this issue. It happened to me when I got "read tcp 127.0.0.1:3334->127.0.0.1:60896: read: connection reset by peer". Now I cannot start browsh, because Firefox still runs. browsh should attempt to use the existing headless Firefox session if it's already running, please.

Just for the record, sure I killed Firefox so things work again, the error was unlucky coincidence, still a bummer that browsh can't pickup a headless client after it lost it.

[tombh]

#61 is a different problem?

[martin-braun]

@tombh Sorry, really missed that, thanks for linking it again.

[Kizuna-Meraki]

+1
browsh 1.8.0
Mozilla Firefox 109.0.1
macOS Ventura 13.2

if I wait long enough, I can use browsh again without getting the error message "A headless Firefox is already running"

[Kishlay-notabot]

+1 on termux

[Kishlay-notabot]

@tombh
@olleharstedt
One thing to add, it happens with the curl installation of browsh but not the linux one i picked from the site. This might answer why is it hard to reproduce

[tombh]

If anybody's on Windows there's a fix in the main branch that should address this: #502

[Kishlay-notabot]

@tombh
Oh, I feel like I should implement this on the linux side only if I knew Android dev.. I want to work on this. Can you tell me some prerequisites to do it? As in programming languages needed or understanding of other topics and at how much depth? I already have some experience with python and many other langs or topics. (if I just mention my programming experience, it's diverse but surface level)
Thanks

[tombh]

I think termux is a different beast altogether. To be honest, I don't think Browsh should be run directly on Android, rather it should be connected to a remote server via SSH, or better yet, MoSH. That's how I designed Browsh.

[martin-braun]

@tombh Oh wow, thanks for bringing mosh onto my radar, I was looking for this some time ago without luck. Input lag on SSH is annoying.