Chromium rendering failing in self-hosted Looker after upgrading to 24.8

[KevinRuprecht1]

I am the administrator for a self-hosted Looker deployment that uses a Dockerfile to deploy an image into a cloud environment. I am trying to upgrade Looker from 21.20 to 24.8.

There have been a number of issues - upgrading openJDK8 to openJDK11, upgrading Ubuntu from 16.04 to 22.04, grabbing a Git ppa to install a more recent version of Git than 22.04 has, etc.

I am very much stuck on the Chromium issue now. I used to install the Chromium browser just through apt-get update && apt-get install chromium-browser. There's also a somewhat non-standard piece of code for creating the symlink between 'chromium' and 'chromium-browser'. Previous developers wrote a separate script that is

exec /usr/bin/chromium-browser --no-sandbox "@"

The symlink is executed in the Dockerfile 

RUN ln -s [script].sh /usr/bin/chromium

There are other bits of code later to change permissions for the script to the Looker user. This setup worked fine with 21.20 until I had to upgrade because of the breaking change to map visuals.

With upgrading Ubuntu to 22.04, I can no longer install chromium-browser through apt. It's now a snap package for Ubuntu, and snap doesn't work with Dockerfile due to some kind of process conflict. I have been trying all kinds of alternatives inside my Dockerfile. Installing older versions of debian packages for Ubuntu, installing directly from a ZIP file URL that Looker support gave to me, and installing different versions from here http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/c/chromium-browser/.

I have tried modifying the [script].sh commands for executing the chromium-browser package. I have tried getting rid of that script entirely and trying to following this documentation more closely. https://cloud.google.com/looker/docs/installation-of-rendering-software & https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Exploring-Curating-Data/How-to-install-specifics-versions-of....

Nothing has worked. I am in contact with Looker support as well, but we have not had success yet. I am hoping someone else has already worked through this issue and can share learnings. At this point I cannot get the Looker upgrade to work successfully, which means maps are just going to break in production on July 1st because the alternative of PDF email jobs not working is worse.

[JulesC]

I know this is an old topic at this point, but in case you are still stuck on this here's another approach you could try.  Essentially what you need is this specific version of Chromium: (126.0.6478.114-1)

if you don't already have the Google apt source in your source collection add it and update and then install the above version

something like:

sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list'
curl -s -o - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add -
apt update
apt install google-chrome-stable=126.0.6478.114-1