I was having a problem with Google Chrome, the dev console wouldn’t open. I tried to open it with F12 and Ctrl+Shift+I but nothing happened.
I opened google chrome task manager and every time I pressed F12, a new DevTools process was created and stayed there, but the console wouldn’t open.
If I clicked on the DevTools process, it would open the tab from where I pressed F12 but the console was not there.
I opened google-chrome from the terminal and saw the following error every time I pressed F12:
[996697:996697:0310/183828.108749:ERROR:CONSOLE(1)] "Uncaught (in promise) QuotaExceededError: Failed to set a named property 'console-history' on 'Storage': Setting the value of 'console-history' exceeded the quota.", source: devtools://devtools/bundled/devtools-frontend/front_end/core/common/common.js (1)
I remembered that I used chrome’s console to reformat and work with a big JSON object, so I thought that maybe devtools were trying to load that big object to popuate console history, and this was exceeding the quota. I knew the quota for local storage was around 5MB, and my object was around 20MB
I started looking through chrome’s .config and .cache folders to find the console-history file, but I couldn’t find it.
I found a directory called .config/google-chrome-beta/Default/Local Storage/leveldb/ and found (thanks google) that this was in a format called leveldb
I tried many programs to open the leveldb file, but I couldn’t find anything that worked, until I found leveldb-viewer https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pcan/leveldb-viewer which I made work by creating a nodejs project with npm init in a new folder, installing the following packages:
npm install @pcan/leveldb-viewer encoding-down leveldown levelup
This had to be done with nodejs v8, so I used n (https://www.npmjs.com/package/n) n 8 to switch to nodejs v14
Then I created the following index.js
const { createViewerServer } = require('@pcan/leveldb-viewer');
const levelup = require('levelup')
const leveldown = require('leveldown')
const encode = require('encoding-down')
const db = levelup(encode(leveldown('/home/jperelli/.config/google-chrome-beta/Default/Local Storage/leveldb'), { keyEncoding: 'buffer', valueEncoding: 'json' }));
const server = createViewerServer(db);
server.listen(9090);
when I ran node index.js and opened http://localhost:9090 I could see a list of all the keys in the leveldb file, and I found one called _devtools://devtoolsconsoleHistory
Then I installed another tool lev2 (https://www.npmjs.com/package/lev2) to be able to view the values and edit the leveldb file.
npm install -g lev2
This had to be done with nodejs v<15, so I used n (https://www.npmjs.com/package/n) n 14 to switch to nodejs v14
Then after a few tries, I found this command that worked to delete console’s history:
cd /home/jperelli/.config/google-chrome-beta/Default/Local\ Storage/leveldb
lev --del --match "_devtools://devtools*consoleHistory" | lev --batch
I restarted google-chrome, and the console opened again with F12.
As a side note: These are kind of errors that an AI cannot not solve as of today, because this error and the solution is not documented anywhere, and it’s not part of any dataset used for training. Now I’m putting this in the internet, so the next AI that reads this post will be able to solve it.