Chromium fails to start inside docker container

[cliff-wakefield-acurus]

When the container starts up with -- or when the first invocation against Chromium occurs I get the following, this seems to happen for 8.x and 8.5.x

[FATAL] starting chromium: launch supervisor: start process: run exec allocator: chrome failed to start:
[0514/070136.832582:FATAL:spawn_subprocess.cc(237)] posix_spawn /opt/google/chrome/chrome_crashpad_handler: Operation not permitted (1)
[0514/070137.324653:WARNING:spawn_subprocess.cc(262)] intermediate process terminated by signal 5 (Trace/breakpoint trap) (core dumped)

The rest of the startup seems normal

  _____     __           __
 / ___/__  / /____ ___  / /  ___ _______ _
/ (_ / _ \/ __/ -_) _ \/ _ \/ -_) __/ _ '/
\___/\___/\__/\__/_//_/_.__/\__/_/  \_, /
                                   /___/

A Docker-powered stateless API for PDF files.
Version: 8.5.0
-------------------------------------------------------
[SYSTEM] modules: api chromium exiftool libreoffice libreoffice-api libreoffice-pdfengine logging pdfcpu pdfengines pdftk prometheus qpdf webhook
[SYSTEM] libreoffice-api: LibreOffice ready to start
[SYSTEM] prometheus: collecting metrics
[SYSTEM] pdfengines: exiftool libreoffice-pdfengine pdfcpu pdftk qpdf

Have tried this under

• Ubuntu 16.04 and Docker v20.x.x
• Ubuntu 20.04 and Docker v26.1.1

The container is simply started using Docker compose

services:
  gotenberg1:
    container_name: gotenberg1
    image: gotenberg/gotenberg:8
    command:
      - gotenberg
      - --chromium-auto-start 

I have no idea where to start to debug this, really wanted to move from AthenaPDF to Gotenberg but the only place I can get it to run is on my Macbook Pro (M1 Max).

[gulien]

Hey @cliff-wakefield-acurus 👋

I wonder if your Ubuntu versions are not "too old". Could you try on 24.04?

[christianmittler]

I actually have a similar problem, when I try to deploy gotenberg to Heroku or DigitalOcean, the deployment fails with the following error message:

[FATAL] provision module api: get routers: provision module chromium: CHROMIUM_BIN_PATH environment variable is not set

[cliff-wakefield-acurus]

Hey @cliff-wakefield-acurus 👋

I wonder if your Ubuntu versions are not "too old". Could you try on 24.04?

I am not able to change the OS used by our production environment anytime soon.

The theory of a docker container is that it has all of its dependencies bundled within it, so the outer operating systems just needs to be able to run docker itself.

I can try it on Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 but if it works I am not sure how that helps me resolve or track down the issue.

[cliff-wakefield-acurus]

Ok created clean VMs based on Ubuntu cloud images for 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04 and 24.04.

Installed docker from the official Docker apt repositories, except for 16.04 where I had to use the Ubuntu apt repositories.

Ran the same docker-compose.yml on all of them, all seemed to work except for 16.04 which still gets

gotenberg_1  |
gotenberg_1  |   _____     __           __
gotenberg_1  |  / ___/__  / /____ ___  / /  ___ _______ _
gotenberg_1  | / (_ / _ \/ __/ -_) _ \/ _ \/ -_) __/ _ '/
gotenberg_1  | \___/\___/\__/\__/_//_/_.__/\__/_/  \_, /
gotenberg_1  |                                    /___/
gotenberg_1  |
gotenberg_1  | A Docker-powered stateless API for PDF files.
gotenberg_1  | Version: 8.5.0
gotenberg_1  | -------------------------------------------------------
gotenberg_1  | [SYSTEM] modules: api chromium exiftool libreoffice libreoffice-api libreoffice-pdfengine logging pdfcpu pdfengines pdftk prometheus qpdf webhook
gotenberg_1  | [SYSTEM] libreoffice-api: LibreOffice ready to start
gotenberg_1  | [SYSTEM] prometheus: collecting metrics
gotenberg_1  | [SYSTEM] pdfengines: exiftool libreoffice-pdfengine pdfcpu pdftk qpdf
gotenberg_1  | [FATAL] starting chromium: launch supervisor: start process: run exec allocator: chrome failed to start:
gotenberg_1  | [0517/025433.125110:FATAL:spawn_subprocess.cc(237)] posix_spawn /opt/google/chrome/chrome_crashpad_handler: Operation not permitted (1)
gotenberg_1  | [0517/025433.336253:WARNING:spawn_subprocess.cc(262)] intermediate process terminated by signal 5 (Trace/breakpoint trap) (core dumped)
gotenberg_1  |
ubuntu_gotenberg_1 exited with code 1

[gulien]

👍 nothing much I can do on my side.

It's either: the Docker version or the kernel that is too old (or both).