projectdiscovery/katana · error

could not get buttons

Error message

could not get buttons

What it means

Wrapper error from FindNavigations raised when b.GetAllElements(buttonsCSSSelector) fails while collecting buttons/inputs matching "button, input[type='button'], input[type='submit']". The selector is evaluated in-page via window.getAllElements; a failure is a CDP eval error or a JSON unmarshal error of the element list. It stops button discovery for the page.

Source

Thrown at pkg/engine/headless/browser/element.go:91

			// TODO: Check if this button is already in the unique map
			// and if so remove it
			unique[element.Hash()] = struct{}{}
		}
		hash := form.Hash()
		if _, found := unique[hash]; found {
			continue
		}
		unique[hash] = struct{}{}

		navigations = append(navigations, &types.Action{
			Type: types.ActionTypeFillForm,
			Form: form,
		})
	}

	buttons, err := b.GetAllElements(buttonsCSSSelector)
	if err != nil {
		return nil, errors.Wrap(err, "could not get buttons")
	}
	for _, button := range buttons {
		if isElementDisabled(button) {
			continue
		}

		hash := button.Hash()
		button.MD5Hash = hash

		if _, found := unique[hash]; found {
			continue
		}
		unique[hash] = struct{}{}
		navigations = append(navigations, &types.Action{
			Type:    types.ActionTypeLeftClick,
			Element: button,
		})
	}

View on GitHub (pinned to e3e742739c)

Solutions

1. Wait for page load (page.WaitLoad / WaitPageLoadHeuristics) before calling FindNavigations
2. Retry the page; CDP context-destroyed errors are transient
3. Verify the browser process is healthy and increase headless memory limits
4. Skip the page on this error (log and continue) since crawl resilience matters more than a single page

Example fix

// before
buttons, err := page.FindNavigations()
if err != nil { return fmt.Errorf("crawl failed: %w", err) }
// after
buttons, err := page.FindNavigations()
if err != nil {
    logger.Warn("skipping page: button discovery failed", slog.String("error", err.Error()))
    return nil
}

// selector and page readiness check before eval
if err := page.WaitLoad(); err != nil { return retry }

func hasButtons(p *browser.BrowserPage) bool {
    els, err := p.GetAllElements("button")
    return err == nil && len(els) >= 0 // err==nil proves eval health
}

navs, err := page.FindNavigations()
if err != nil {
    logger.Debug("button discovery failed", slog.String("error", err.Error()))
    return retryOrSkip(page)
}

When it happens

Trigger: 1) Page navigated or execution context destroyed between the forms and buttons steps. 2) Tab crashed/closed. 3) window.getAllElements helper not injected into this document. 4) Unmarshal failure of the returned element array.

Common situations: Crawling pages with rapid client-side redirects; heavy multi-tab crawling where renderers get killed; older katana builds with flaky eval marshaling.

Related errors

• could not get forms
• could not get links
• could not get page info
• could not get event listeners
• could not get page state

AI-assisted analysis of projectdiscovery/katana@e3e742739c (2026-09-03). Data as JSON: /api/errors/eaca255ebdac9930. Report an issue: GitHub.