What is the chrome command line argument in headless / no-sandbox-mode that picks the tmp directory?

Question

I am running chromium headless with Selenium.

When I run a bunch of sessions I end up with a bunch of tmp files in /tmp

drwx------  3 nick nick 4.0K Jul 28 05:00 .org.chromium.Chromium.OpPRkQ
drwx------  3 nick nick 4.0K Jul 29 00:00 .org.chromium.Chromium.tAwQZu
drwx------  3 nick nick 4.0K Jul 29 00:00 .org.chromium.Chromium.JiqQZu
drwx------  3 nick nick 4.0K Jul 29 00:00 .org.chromium.Chromium.7Vce75
drwx------  3 nick nick 4.0K Jul 29 00:00 .org.chromium.Chromium.r5ITam
drwx------  3 nick nick 4.0K Jul 29 00:00 .org.chromium.Chromium.eWgdRV
drwx------  3 nick nick 4.0K Jul 29 00:00 .org.chromium.Chromium.8TITam
drwx------  3 nick nick 4.0K Jul 29 05:00 .org.chromium.Chromium.aeuzcU
drwx------  3 nick nick 4.0K Jul 29 05:00 .org.chromium.Chromium.cBHew4

What is Google Chrome command line switch I can set to choose a different path for these directories? I cannot use /tmp because the root disk doesn't have much disk space on the cloud.

Is there a way to have these directories automatically deleted upon shutdown of the chrome process?

See https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/

Answer 1

Wow it took me a long time to find this:

There is no command line argument that does this. But environment variable can.

Here is the relevant chromedriver code:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/chromium/+/master/base/file_util_posix.cc

#if !defined(OS_MACOSX)
bool GetTempDir(FilePath* path) {
  const char* tmp = getenv("TMPDIR");
  if (tmp)
    *path = FilePath(tmp);
  else
#if defined(OS_ANDROID)
    return PathService::Get(base::DIR_CACHE, path);
#else
    *path = FilePath("/tmp");
#endif
  return true;
}

So for linux, you can just set a TMPDIR environment variable in the Chrome session to do this.

So in selenium, you have to do this:

ChromeDriverService chromeDriverService = new ChromeDriverService.Builder()
         .usingDriverExecutable(new File("driver_linux/chromedriver"))
         .usingAnyFreePort()
         .withEnvironment(ImmutableMap.of("TMPDIR", "/some/other/tmp/dir")).build();