macos - OSX fix Selenium Chromedriver launch error spawn Unknown system error -86 Bad CPU type in executable?

Question

Suddenly on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, my Selenium Protractor tests under OSX stopped working with the mysterious error

spawn Unknown system error -86

I did some research and discovered that error number 86 is the same as

Bad CPU type in executable

and ran the following to compare the cpu architecture of my chromedriver binary to my system:

% file chromedriver_87.0.4280.88
chromedriver_87.0.4280.88: Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64
% uname -a
Darwin kobl179273m 19.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 19.6.0: Thu Oct 29 22:56:45 PDT 2020; root:xnu-6153.141.2.2~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
% uname -p
i386

How can I fix the chromedriver binary used by my Selenium so that it will run on my Intel x64 mac and clear the "system error -86" or "Bad CPU type" message?

Answer 1

The issue is described in https://github.com/angular/webdriver-manager/issues/476. This has been now fixed in 12.1.8 so just update to that webdriver manager.

For most users this can be accomplished with

npm uninstall protractor && npm install protractor