Chrome policy RemoteDebuggingAllowed:false calls devTools ECONNREFUSED error

[Stephanzion]

It took me 24 hours to find out that my windows build has pre-installed chrome policies that affect the behaviour of all installed chromium browsers, including portable versions.

One of them makes it impossible to start the chromium browser because it blocks external connections to devTools websoket.

Address value in windows registry:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\RemoteDebuggingAllowed
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Chromium\RemoteDebuggingAllowed

(value 0 causes the error)

You can see the value of the policy in chrome://policy:
RemoteDebuggingAllowed = false

If this value is false, as in my case, the browser will crash with an error:

Starting Chromium instance...

Error: connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:64165
    at TCPConnectWrap.afterConnect [as oncomplete] (node:net:1636:16) {
  errno: -4078,
  code: ‘ECONNREFUSED’,
  syscall: ‘connect’,
  address: ‘127.0.0.1’,
  port: 64165
}

Port 64165 is random. Please add a clearer message to the logs that causes an error when trying to connect to devTools websoket. In the error message you can add a tip to check the configuration of this policy.

[Rob--W]

Thanks for your report. I have put up a PR to switch from the WebSocket server to the remote debugging pipe, but that too is affected by this policy (relevant Chromium source code).

We use chrome-launcher to launch Chrome, and that dependency is responsible for creating the WebSocket when --remote-debugging-port is specified. The currently published web-ext version does not depend on the port (but it will break for other reasons - #3388); I think that it makes sense to flag this issue in the chrome-launcher project, so that an appropriate error can be raised from there (and propagate to downstream dependents, such as web-ext).

[Rob--W]

I've filed an issue in chrome-launcher at GoogleChrome/chrome-launcher#352

[Stephanzion]

thank you!