Solved: axe cli won't run in WSL

by Dylan Thomas

Published:: Feb 14, 2023
Last Update:: Feb 14, 2023
Reading time:: 1 min

SOLVED posts detail solutions to problems I could not find anywhere else.

After installing axe-cli in my Ubuntu/Windows 11 environment using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), I got the following error whenever I tried to run it:

Chrome failed to start: crashed
(unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist)
(The process started from chrome location [file path] is no longer running, so ChromeDriver is assuming that Chrome has crashed.)

This can be caused by a lot of things (and I tried most of them), but in my case it was caused by Chrome not being installed in my WSL environment, which makes sense because I only use it for command line programs.

To install Chrome, run these 3 commands in sequence:

wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install -f

These commands will download Chrome and install it along with any needed dependencies.

Source: WikiHow.com - Install Google Chrome Using Terminal on Linux