How to configure ChromeDriver to initiate Chrome browser in Headless mode through Selenium?

Python Selenium Selenium Webdriver Selenium Chromedriver Google Chrome-Headless

Python Problem Overview

I'm working on a python script to web-scrape and have gone down the path of using Chromedriver as one of the packages. I would like this to operate in the background without any pop-up windows. I'm using the option 'headless' on chromedriver and it seems to do the job in terms of not showing the browser window, however, I still see the .exe file running. See the screenshot of what I'm talking about. Screenshot

This is the code I am using to initiate ChromeDriver:

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches",["ignore-certificate-errors"])
options.add_argument('headless')
options.add_argument('window-size=0x0')
chrome_driver_path = "C:\Python27\Scripts\chromedriver.exe"

Things I've tried to do is alter the window size in the options to 0x0 but I'm not sure that did anything as the .exe file still popped up.

Any ideas of how I can do this?

I am using Python 2.7 FYI

Python Solutions

Solution 1 - Python

It should look like this:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

options = Options()
options.add_argument('--headless')
options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')  # Last I checked this was necessary.
driver = webdriver.Chrome(CHROMEDRIVER_PATH, chrome_options=options)

This works for me using Python 3.6, I'm sure it'll work for 2.7 too.

Update 2018-10-26: These days you can just do this:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

options = Options()
options.headless = True
driver = webdriver.Chrome(CHROMEDRIVER_PATH, options=options)

Solution 2 - Python

Answer update of 13-October-2018

To initiate a [tag:google-chrome-headless] browsing context using Selenium driven ChromeDriver now you can just set the --headless property to true through an instance of Options() class as follows:

Effective code block:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

options = Options()
options.headless = True
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path=r'C:\path\to\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get("http://google.com/")
print ("Headless Chrome Initialized")
driver.quit()

Answer update of 23-April-2018

Invoking [tag:google-chrome] in [tag:headless] mode programmatically have become much easier with the availability of the method set_headless(headless=True) as follows :

Documentation :

set_headless(headless=True)
    Sets the headless argument

    Args:
  	  headless: boolean value indicating to set the headless option

Sample Code :

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

options = Options()
options.set_headless(headless=True)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path=r'C:\path\to\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get("http://google.com/")
print ("Headless Chrome Initialized")
driver.quit()

>Note : --disable-gpu argument is implemented internally.

Original Answer of Mar 30 '2018

While working with Selenium Client 3.11.x, ChromeDriver v2.38 and Google Chrome v65.0.3325.181 in Headless mode you have to consider the following points :

You need to add the argument --headless to invoke Chrome in headless mode.
For Windows OS systems you need to add the argument --disable-gpu
As per Headless: make --disable-gpu flag unnecessary --disable-gpu flag is not required on Linux Systems and MacOS.
As per SwiftShader fails an assert on Windows in headless mode --disable-gpu flag will become unnecessary on Windows Systems too.
Argument start-maximized is required for a maximized Viewport.
Here is the link to details about Viewport.
You may require to add the argument --no-sandbox to bypass the OS security model.

Effective [tag:windows] code block :

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

options = Options()
options.add_argument("--headless") # Runs Chrome in headless mode.
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox') # Bypass OS security model
options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')  # applicable to windows os only
options.add_argument('start-maximized') # 
options.add_argument('disable-infobars')
options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options, executable_path=r'C:\path\to\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get("http://google.com/")
print ("Headless Chrome Initialized on Windows OS")

Effective [tag:linux] code block :

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

options = Options()
options.add_argument("--headless") # Runs Chrome in headless mode.
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox') # # Bypass OS security model
options.add_argument('start-maximized')
options.add_argument('disable-infobars')
options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options, executable_path='/path/to/chromedriver')
driver.get("http://google.com/")
print ("Headless Chrome Initialized on Linux OS")

Steps through YouTube Video

How to initialize Chrome Browser in Maximized Mode through Selenium

Outro

How to make firefox headless programmatically in Selenium with python?

tl; dr

Here is the link to the Sandbox story.

Solution 3 - Python

Update August 20, 2020 -- Now is simple!

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.headless = True

self.driver = webdriver.Chrome(
            executable_path=DRIVER_PATH, chrome_options=chrome_options)

Solution 4 - Python

UPDATED It works fine in my case:

from selenium import webdriver

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.headless = True
driver = webdriver.Chrome(CHROMEDRIVER_PATH, options=options)

Just changed in 2020. Works fine for me.

Solution 5 - Python

So after correcting my code to:

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches",["ignore-certificate-errors"])
options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')
options.add_argument('--headless')
chrome_driver_path = "C:\Python27\Scripts\chromedriver.exe"

The .exe file still came up when running the script. Although this did get rid of some extra output telling me "Failed to launch GPU process".

What ended up working is running my Python script using a .bat file

So basically,

Save python script if a folder
Open text editor, and dump the following code (edit to your script of course)

c:\python27\python.exe c:\SampleFolder\ThisIsMyScript.py %*
Save the .txt file and change the extension to .bat
Double click this to run the file

So this just opened the script in Command Prompt and ChromeDriver seems to be operating within this window without popping out to the front of my screen and thus solving the problem.

Solution 6 - Python

The .exe would be running anyway. According to Google - "Run in headless mode, i.e., without a UI or display server dependencies."
Better prepend 2 dashes to command line arguments, i.e. options.add_argument('--headless')
In headless mode, it is also suggested to disable the GPU, i.e. options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')

Solution 7 - Python

Try using ChromeDriverManager

from selenium import webdriver
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager 
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.set_headless()
browser =webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install(),chrome_options=chrome_options)
browser.get('https://google.com')
# capture the screen
browser.get_screenshot_as_file("capture.png")

Solution 8 - Python

Solutions above don't work with websites with cloudflare protection, example: https://paxful.com/fr/buy-bitcoin.

Modify agent as follows: options.add_argument("user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4147.125 Safari/537.36")

Fix found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59174899/what-is-the-difference-in-accessing-cloudflare-website-using-chromedriver-chrome

Solution 9 - Python

  
from chromedriver_py import binary_path
 
 
chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
   chrome_options.add_argument('--headless')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--window-size=1280x1696')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--user-data-dir=/tmp/user-data')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--hide-scrollbars')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--enable-logging')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--log-level=0')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--v=99')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--single-process')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--data-path=/tmp/data-path')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--ignore-certificate-errors')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--homedir=/tmp')
   chrome_options.add_argument('--disk-cache-dir=/tmp/cache-dir')
   chrome_options.add_argument('user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36')
   
  driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path = binary_path,options=chrome_options)

Solution 10 - Python

chromeoptions=add_argument("--no-sandbox");
add_argument("--ignore-certificate-errors");
add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage'")

is not a supported browser

solution:

Open Browser    ${event_url}    ${BROWSER}   options=add_argument("--no-sandbox"); add_argument("--ignore-certificate-errors"); add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage'")

don't forget to add spaces between ${BROWSER} options

Solution 11 - Python

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver",
		 "D:\\Lib\\chrome_driver_latest\\chromedriver_win32\\chromedriver.exe");
ChromeOptions chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();
chromeOptions.addArguments("--allow-running-insecure-content");
chromeOptions.addArguments("--window-size=1920x1080");
chromeOptions.addArguments("--disable-gpu"); 
chromeOptions.setHeadless(true);
ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(chromeOptions);

Solution 12 - Python

There is an option to hide the chromeDriver.exe window in alpha and beta versions of Selenium 4.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service as ChromeService # Similar thing for firefox also!
from subprocess import CREATE_NO_WINDOW # This flag will only be available in windows
chrome_service = ChromeService('chromedriver', creationflags=CREATE_NO_WINDOW)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=chrome_service) # No longer console window opened, niether will chromedriver output

You can check it out from here. To pip install beta or alpha versions, you can do "pip install selenium==4.0.0.a7" or "pip install selenium==4.0.0.b4" (a7 means alpha-7 and b4 means beta-4 so for other versions you want, you can modify the command.) To import a specific version of a library in python you can look here.

Solution 13 - Python

Update August 2021:

The fastest way to do is probably:

from selenium import webdriver  

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.set_headless = True
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)

options.headless = True is deprecated.

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	Maz	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Python	Daniel Porteous	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Python	undetected Selenium	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Python	Eduardo Luis Santos	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 4 - Python	Zubayer	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 5 - Python	Maz	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 6 - Python	Aurel Branzeanu	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 7 - Python	Sudheer Muhammed	View Answer on Stackoverflow
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