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.
66 Answers
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 = "" driver.get(start_url) print(driver.page_source.encode("utf-8")) # b'<!DOCTYPE html><html xmlns=" 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
2Note: As of today, when running chrome headless on Windows., you should include the
--disable-gpuflag See
Install & run containerized Chrome:
docker pull selenium/standalone-chrome docker run --rm -d -p 4444:4444 --shm-size=2g selenium/standalone-chrome Connect using webdriver.Remote:
driver = webdriver.Remote(' DesiredCapabilities.CHROME) driver.set_window_size(1280, 1024) driver.get(') from time import sleep from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options chrome_options = Options() chrome_options.add_argument("--headless") driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="./chromedriver", options=chrome_options) url = "" driver.get(url) sleep(5) h1 = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//h1[@itemprop='name']").text print(h1) Then I run script on our local machine
➜ python script.py Running Selenium with Headless Chrome Webdriver It is working and it is with headless Chrome.
If you are using Linux environment, may be you have to add --no-sandbox as well and also specific window size settings. The --no-sandbox flag is no needed on Windows if you set user container properly.
Use --disable-gpu only on Windows. Other platforms no longer require it. The --disable-gpu flag is a temporary work around for a few bugs.
//Headless chrome browser and configure WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup(); ChromeOptions chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions(); chromeOptions.addArguments("--no-sandbox"); chromeOptions.addArguments("--headless"); chromeOptions.addArguments("disable-gpu"); // chromeOptions.addArguments("window-size=1400,2100"); // Linux should be activate driver = new ChromeDriver(chromeOptions); Once you have selenium and web driver installed. Below worked for me with headless Chrome on linux cluster :
from selenium import webdriver options = webdriver.ChromeOptions() options.add_argument("--headless") options.add_argument("--disable-extensions") options.add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage") options.add_argument("--no-sandbox") options.add_experimental_option("prefs",{"download.default_directory":"/databricks/driver"}) driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options) Todo (tested on headless server Debian Linux 9.4):
Do this:
# install chrome curl -sS -o - | apt-key add - echo "deb [arch=amd64] stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list apt-get -y update apt-get -y install google-chrome-stable # install chrome driver wget unzip chromedriver_linux64.zip mv chromedriver /usr/bin/chromedriver chown root:root /usr/bin/chromedriver chmod +x /usr/bin/chromedriverInstall selenium:
pip install seleniumand run this Python code:
from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options options = Options() options.add_argument("no-sandbox") options.add_argument("headless") options.add_argument("start-maximized") options.add_argument("window-size=1900,1080"); driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options, executable_path="/usr/bin/chromedriver") driver.get("") html = driver.page_source print(html)
