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.
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
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('http://localhost:4444/wd/hub', DesiredCapabilities.CHROME)
driver.set_window_size(1280, 1024)
driver.get('https://www.google.com')
from selenium import webdriver
and driver = webdriver.Remote('http://localhost:4444/wd/hub', webdriver.DesiredCapabilities.CHROME)
DesiredCapabilities
from? I don't see the import... I think you meant to use webdriver.DesiredCapabilities
?
--headless
flag in chrome, and will prevent you from browsing the website with your software. By using a docker container, you circumvent that --headless
flag that can cause you to be blocked.
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 = "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53657215/running-selenium-with-headless-chrome-webdriver"
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 - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add - echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ 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 https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/77.0.3865.40/chromedriver_linux64.zip unzip chromedriver_linux64.zip mv chromedriver /usr/bin/chromedriver chown root:root /usr/bin/chromedriver chmod +x /usr/bin/chromedriver Install selenium: pip install selenium and 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("https://www.example.com") html = driver.page_source print(html)
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