unable to connect to chromedriver

I had the exact same issue. What worked for me was using the "webdrivers" gem. Part of my gemfile looks like this:

group :development, :test do  gem 'rspec-rails'  gem 'capybara'  gem 'webdrivers'end

On Mac OS

It works fine with watir-webdriver and Safari

browser = Watir::Browser.new :safari

If you'd like to use Chrome, make sure that it is installed, plus you need to install mac os developer tools with

xcode-select --install

and also install chromedriver with brew

brew install chromedriver

On Linux

I had the same error on my staging Ubuntu 12.04 server and the problem was I didn't install chrome itself like this (with superuser permissions):

wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add -sh -c 'echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list'apt-get updateapt-get install google-chrome-stable

Install chromedriver(use proper path for your system and version):

wget http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/2.7/chromedriver_linux64.zipunzip chromedriver_linux64.zipcp chromedriver /usr/local/binchmod +x /usr/local/bin/chromedriver 

After that I would recommend you to use watir-webdriver in headless mode

require 'watir-webdriver'require 'headless'headless = Headless.newheadless.startbrowser = Watir::Browser.new :chromebrowser.goto 'http://google.com'...browser.closeheadless.destroy

Good luck!

Running on Ubuntu 12.10, I also had the error message:

unable to connect to chromedriver http://127.0.0.1:9515

Wasn't working even after I downloaded it and installed it correctly. I even tried using the chromedriver-helper gem. So I ran chromedriver manually (/usr/bin/chromedriver) and found out 2 things:

1) I had a missing package dependency on libnss3 which was fixed using sudo apt-get install libnss3

2) Version 2.9 of chromedriver (latest as of Feb 2014) requires chrome > version 31, and I had v25, which was fixed using sudo apt-get --only-upgrade install google-chrome-stable