How to Configure Chromedriver to Initiate Chrome Browser in Headless Mode Through Selenium

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.

How To Configure Chrome Browser To Run In Headless Mode

I'd recommend not using mouse click for the submit button but use the keyboard instead:

from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
consent.send_keys(Keys.ENTER)

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

Printing a PDF with Selenium Chrome Driver in headless mode

For anyone else coming across this with a similar issue, I fixed it by using the print method described here: Selenium print PDF in A4 format

Using my example from above, I replaced:

driver.execute_script("window.print();")

with:

pdf_data = driver.execute_cdp_cmd("Page.printToPDF", print_settings)
with open('Google.pdf', 'wb') as file:
    file.write(base64.b64decode(pdf_data['data']))

And that worked just fine for me.

How to Configure Chromedriver to Initiate Chrome Browser in Headless Mode Through Selenium