How to Start Chromedriver in Headless Mode

How to start ChromeDriver in headless mode

UPDATE
Chrome version 60 is out so all you need to do is to download Chromdriver and Selenium via Nuget and use this simple code and everything works like a charm. Amazing.

using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;

...

var chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();
chromeOptions.AddArguments("headless");

using (var browser = new ChromeDriver(chromeOptions))
{
  // add your code here
}

DATED

There is a solution until the official release of Chrome 60 will be released. You can download Chrome Canary and use headless with it. After installation set BinaryLocation to point to chrome canary also comment out the DebuggerAddress line(it forces chrome to timeout):

var chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions
{
    BinaryLocation = @"C:\Users\2-as Aukstas\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome SxS\Application\chrome.exe",
    //DebuggerAddress = "127.0.0.1:9222"
};

chromeOptions.AddArguments(new List<string>() { "no-sandbox", "headless", "disable-gpu" });

var _driver = new ChromeDriver(chromeOptions);

Running Selenium with Headless Chrome Webdriver

To run chrome-headless just add --headless via chrome_options.add_argument, i.e.:

from selenium import webdriver 
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
chrome_options = Options()
#chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")
#chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-gpu")
#chrome_options.add_argument("--no-sandbox") # linux only
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")
# chrome_options.headless = True # also works
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chrome_options)
start_url = "https://duckgo.com"
driver.get(start_url)
print(driver.page_source.encode("utf-8"))
# b'<!DOCTYPE html><html xmlns="http://www....
driver.quit()

So my thought is that running it with headless chrome would make my
script faster.

Try using chrome options like --disable-extensions or --disable-gpu and benchmark it, but I wouldn't count with much improvement.

References: headless-chrome

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

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.

Launching chrome in headless mode with selenium in Java giving error

You need to take care of a few things here:

You have already download the ChromeDriver and accessing it as:

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "src/main/extras/chromedriver.exe");

Additionally you are also downloading ChromeDriver through WebDriverManager as:
```
WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup();
```

As a result your program have access to multiple instances of ChromeDriver. Hence you see:

Exception in thread "Thread-3" java.lang.NullPointerException

Solution

You need to use only one instance of ChromeDriver either the downloaded version or the one downloaded and accessed through WebDriverManager

chromedriver in headless mode

Chrome headless is ideally much better than PhantomJS, whose owner decided to stop maintaining the project because the arrival of Chrome headless made it a bit less necessary. That being said, if you have a Chrome version which supports headless, you can do this:

from selenium import webdriver

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('headless')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)

As you see, headless is an argument, so if for some reason you want to run the same code but you need to see the GUI, remove that argument.

By the way, if you ever wanted to give the binary location, a nice way to do it is also with options:

options.binary_location = 'path to your chrome binary'

But if your installed version is recent enough, there should be no reason to do so.

How to Start Chromedriver in Headless Mode