How to fix the invalid session id in Wallaby integration testing

Updated: 2022-13-12. Now the Wallaby can display the difference of Chrome vs chromedriver, so you don’t need to run the script in the Solution section.

Problem #

When I run the integration test in my kwtool project, then the console raises this error:

test user can visit homepage (KwtoolWeb.HomePage.ViewRegistrationPageTest)
test/kwtool_web/features/registration_page/view_registration_page_test.exs:11
** (RuntimeError) invalid session id
code: |> visit("/")
stacktrace:
(wallaby 0.28.0) lib/wallaby/httpclient.ex:136: Wallaby.HTTPClient.check_for_response_errors/1
(wallaby 0.28.0) lib/wallaby/httpclient.ex:56: Wallaby.HTTPClient.make_request/5

Oh, what!? It has run successfully before. Why does it happen today?

At first sight, we can see this is a RuntimeError, and the message is “invalid session id”. We can read more details about this error here.

Dig a bit deeper, we can see the reason is the difference between Google Chrome version and chromedriver verion.

Solution #

We can use this script below to check the version of both applications.

Create a new file, name it as ./test-wallaby.sh anywhere that easy to manage.

Then paste the content below into that file.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

chromedriver_path=$(command -v chromedriver)

chrome_path="/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome"
chromedriver_version=$("${chromedriver_path}" --version)
chrome_version=$("${chrome_path}" --version)

chromedriver_major_version=$("${chromedriver_path}" --version | cut -f 2 -d " " | cut -f 1 -d ".")
chrome_major_version=$("${chrome_path}" --version | cut -f 3 -d " " | cut -f 1 -d ".")

if [ "${chromedriver_major_version}" == "${chrome_major_version}" ]; then
  exit 0
else
  echo "Wallaby often fails with 'invalid session id' if Chromedriver and Chrome have different versions."
  echo "Chromedriver version: ${chromedriver_version} (${chromedriver_path})"
  echo "Chrome version      : ${chrome_version} (${chrome_path})"
  exit 1
fi

And the result is:

➜ projects ./test-wallaby.sh
Wallaby often fails with 'invalid session id' if Chromedriver and Chrome have different versions.
Chromedriver version: ChromeDriver 88.0.4324.96 (68dba2d8a0324@{#1784}) (/usr/local/bin/chromedriver)
Chrome version      : Google Chrome 90.0.4430.93  (/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome)

Yeah, this could be the issue. Then go to the Chromium website to download the match version of chromedriver

After download the correct version, extract the chromedriver_mac64.zip file then move it to /usr/local/bin by using this command:

mv chromedriver /usr/local/bin

Notice: I am using MacOS so I will put it to /usr/local/bin, please check it depends on your OS.

Now back to the integration testing script and run it again. In my case, now the integration test ran properly on my local development.

Thank you for reading, have a good day :)