Python – Running Selenium with Headless Chrome Webdriver

google-chromegoogle-chrome-headlesspythonseleniumselenium-chromedriver

So I'm trying some stuff out with selenium and I really want it to be quick.

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

First is that assumption correct, or does it not matter if i run my script with a headless driver?

Anyways I still want to get it to work to run headless, but I somehow can't, I tried different things and most suggested that it would work as said here in the October update

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

But when I try that, I get weird console output and it still doesn't seem to work.

Any tipps appreciated.

Best Answer

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"))
driver.quit()
# b'<!DOCTYPE html><html xmlns="http://www....

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

Note: As of today, when running chrome headless on Windows., you should include the  --disable-gpu flag See crbug.com/737678

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