Flatpak ZAP and Manual Explore

[Michael Fischer]

Lot's of new concepts for me as I am switching over to running Linux as my main box.  Hoping someone can tell me what simple thing I sure I missed.  It looks like it would simply be what is seen here but that just changed my error message.  I can not manual explore with Firefox or Chrome. 

FireFox error:

2021-03-20 00:17:17,824 [ZAP-BrowserLauncher] ERROR ExtensionQuickStartLaunch - unknown error: Chrome failed to start: crashed.
  (unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist)
  (The process started from chrome location /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome is no longer running, so ChromeDriver is assuming that Chrome has crashed.)

Chrome  error:

2021-03-20 00:17:17,824 [ZAP-BrowserLauncher] ERROR ExtensionQuickStartLaunch - unknown error: Chrome failed to start: crashed.
  (unknown error: DevToolsActivePort file doesn't exist)
  (The process started from chrome location /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome is no longer running, so ChromeDriver is assuming that Chrome has crashed.)

I've tried running Firefox from debian package, flatpak package and manual download. 

Any pointers would be appreciated.

Michael Fischer

[Simon Bennetts]

Hi Michael,

We have an issue for that :) https://github.com/zaproxy/zaproxy/issues/5824

Flatpak is a sandbox environment which prevents programs from interacting unless they are specifically configured to do so.

ZAP is a security tool which does all sorts of things that could be considered 'dangerous', and launching browsers via selenium is one of them!

Ideally ZAP should be correctly configued to allow this to work, but tbh I'm not even sure if its possible in flatpak.

We should disable browser launch in Flatpak / Snapcraft but as you see that issue is still open.

I'm afraid you'll either have to use the ZAP installer, unpackaged release or configure your browser to proxy via ZAP manually.

Cheers,

Simon