--headless is not an option in Chrome WebDriver for Selenium

Question

I would like to have Selenium run a headless instance of Google Chrome to mine data from certain websites without the UI overhead. I downloaded the ChromeDriver executable from here and copied it to my current scripting directory.

The driver appears to work fine with Selenium and is able to browse automatically, however I cannot seem to find the headless option. Most online examples of using Selenium with headless Chrome go something along the lines of:

import os  
from selenium import webdriver  
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys  
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options  

chrome_options = Options()  
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")  
chrome_options.binary_location = '/Applications/Google Chrome   Canary.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome Canary'`    

driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=os.path.abspath(“chromedriver"),   chrome_options=chrome_options)  
driver.get("http://www.duo.com")` 

However when I inspect the possible arguments for the Selenium WebDriver using the command chromedriver -h this is what I get:

D:\Jobs\scripts>chromedriver -h
Usage: chromedriver [OPTIONS]

Options
  --port=PORT                     port to listen on
  --adb-port=PORT                 adb server port
  --log-path=FILE                 write server log to file instead of stderr, increases log level to INFO
  --log-level=LEVEL               set log level: ALL, DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, SEVERE, OFF
  --verbose                       log verbosely (equivalent to --log-level=ALL)
  --silent                        log nothing (equivalent to --log-level=OFF)
  --append-log                    append log file instead of rewriting
  --replayable                    (experimental) log verbosely and don't truncate long strings so that the log can be replayed.
  --version                       print the version number and exit
  --url-base                      base URL path prefix for commands, e.g. wd/url
  --whitelisted-ips               comma-separated whitelist of remote IP addresses which are allowed to connect to ChromeDriver

No --headless option is available.

Does the ChromeDriver obtained from the link above allow for headless browsing?

Sherbrooke

Yup as far as I have tried, I could never run Google Chrome on headless mode. I just switched to firefox. – Leukocyte

I am able to run in headless mode in macos too. – Fatty

Answer 1

--headless is not argument for chromedriver but for Chrome. --headless Run chrome in headless mode, i.e., without a UI or display server dependencies. ChromeDriver is a separate executable that WebDriver uses to control Chrome and Webdriver is a a collection of language specific bindings to drive a browser.

I am able to run in headless mode with this set of options. I hope this will help:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium import webdriver
import requests
import re  
options = Options()
options.add_argument('--headless')
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')
browser = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)  # see edit for recent code change.
browser.implicitly_wait(20)

Update 12 Aug 2019:

old : browser = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)

new : browser = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)

Fatty

But the executable has no headless option... what does the line options.add_argument('--headless') do? – Sherbrooke

As @ewwink sugeested this is for chrome --headless Run chrome in headless mode, i.e., without a UI or display server dependencies. ChromeDriver is a separate executable that WebDriver uses to control Chrome. Webdriver is a a collection of language specific bindings to drive a browser – Fatty

so let me get this straight... chromedriver.exe itself calls Chrome.exe at some point. The idea is to have it call the driver with an additional argument ? – Sherbrooke

Thanks, that's working well. yeap 'chrome_options' was deprecated so must use 'options'. – Kershaw

Answer 2

Try

options.headless=True

The following is how I set up my headless chrome

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.headless=True
options.add_argument('window-size=1920x1080')
prefs = {
"download.default_directory": r"C:\FilePath\Download",
"download.prompt_for_download": False,
"download.directory_upgrade": True}
options.add_experimental_option('prefs', prefs)
chromedriver = (r"C:\Filepath\chromedriver.exe")

Wenda

Answer 3

--headless is not argument for chromedriver but Chrome, you can see more arguments or Command Line Switches for chrome here

Winton

Answer 4

As many answers correctly state, headless is an option to chrome and not for chromedriver.

Besides all of that:

• there is --headless=new since chrome 109, which will use the very same chrome. Before that chrome and headless chrome was two different built executable (both were installed by chrome installers and packages)

• some answer recommends to use options.headless=True. Do not. See Headless is Going Away!

Cheiro

So to spell it out, do you mean options.add_argument('--headless=new')? – Multiform

exactly. and actually this is the answer. In general we can try pass any Chrome's argument to Chrome using chromedriver's add_argument. In practice this means, that Chrome's documentation is relevant in many cases when we want to control Chrome – Cheiro