selenium-webdriver script isn't finding local file - selenium

Question

I am unable to get a nodejs script loading Chrome to load a local file.
It works on 18.04 but not 22.04.
Has there been some significant change that would affect local file loading syntax, or is there something wrong in my code?
const { Builder } = require('selenium-webdriver')
async function start() {
const chrome = require('selenium-webdriver/chrome')
const options = new chrome.Options()
options.addArguments('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
options.addArguments('--no-sandbox')
const driver = new Builder()
.forBrowser('chrome')
.setChromeOptions(options)
.build()
await driver.get('file://' + __dirname + '/myfile.html')
await driver.sleep(10000)
const text = await driver.executeScript('return document.documentElement.innerText')
console.log(text)
driver.quit()
}
start()
The result is:
Your file couldn’t be accessed
It may have been moved, edited or deleted.
ERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND
I can confirm that myfile.html is definitely present.
Using console.log to show the file argument value shows it is the same for both older and newer Ubuntu.
Changing the driver.get argument to a website, e.g. https://www.google.com/ correctly shows the webpage content in the output.
The local file code fails as above using:
Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS
Node v16.15.0
chromium-browser Chromium 108.0.5359.71 snap
It works fine on:
Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS
Node v16.15.0
Chromium 107.0.5304.87 Built on Ubuntu , running on Ubuntu 18.04

Answer 1

This seems to be because the default Ubuntu 22.04 Chrome package is a snap package that limits local file access to /home/ .
Switching to the .deb distribution from Google solves the issue. The Chromedriver also needs to match.
# Chrome browser - .deb package, not the standard OS Snap which limits access to only /home/
# See: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1184357/why-cant-chromium-suddenly-access-any-partition-except-for-home
# See: https://www.ubuntuupdates.org/ppa/google_chrome?dist=stable
wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add -
sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list'
apt-get update
apt-get install google-chrome-stable
# Chromedriver, matching version number
# See: https://skolo.online/documents/webscrapping/#pre-requisites
# See step 3 at: https://tecadmin.net/setup-selenium-chromedriver-on-ubuntu/
# See: https://sites.google.com/chromium.org/driver/
#!# NB This will become out of sync if apt-get updates google-chrome-stable
google-chrome --version
wget https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/108.0.5359.71/chromedriver_linux64.zip
unzip chromedriver_linux64.zip
sudo mv chromedriver /usr/bin/chromedriver
sudo chown root:root /usr/bin/chromedriver
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/chromedriver
rm chromedriver_linux64.zip