I currently have my Selenium Firefox set up as so:
options = Options()
options.headless = True #hides browser
driver = webdriver.Firefox(options=options,executable_path=r'geckodriver.exe')
Which would make Firefox headless. However, I need it to display the browser window so that I can do some actions myself, and then switch it back to headless mode. Is there a way to do this, either through Firefox or Selenium, without restarting the driver?
I'm working on a python script to web-scrape and have gone down the path of using Chromedriver as one of the packages. I would like this to operate in the background without any pop-up windows. I'm using the option 'headless' on chromedriver and it seems to do the job in terms of not showing the browser window, however, I still see the .exe file running. See the screenshot of what I'm talking about. Screenshot
This is the code I am using to initiate ChromeDriver:
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches",["ignore-certificate-errors"])
options.add_argument('headless')
options.add_argument('window-size=0x0')
chrome_driver_path = "C:\Python27\Scripts\chromedriver.exe"
Things I've tried to do is alter the window size in the options to 0x0 but I'm not sure that did anything as the .exe file still popped up.
Any ideas of how I can do this?
I am using Python 2.7 FYI
It should look like this:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
options = Options()
options.add_argument('--headless')
options.add_argument('--disable-gpu') # Last I checked this was necessary.
driver = webdriver.Chrome(CHROMEDRIVER_PATH, chrome_options=options)
This works for me using Python 3.6, I'm sure it'll work for 2.7 too.
Update 2018-10-26: These days you can just do this:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
options = Options()
options.headless = True
driver = webdriver.Chrome(CHROMEDRIVER_PATH, options=options)
Answer update of 13-October-2018
To initiate a google-chrome-headless browsing context using Selenium driven ChromeDriver now you can just set the --headless property to true through an instance of Options() class as follows:
Effective code block:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
options = Options()
options.headless = True
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path=r'C:\path\to\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get("http://google.com/")
print ("Headless Chrome Initialized")
driver.quit()
Answer update of 23-April-2018
Invoking google-chrome in headless mode programmatically have become much easier with the availability of the method set_headless(headless=True) as follows :
Documentation :
set_headless(headless=True)
Sets the headless argument
Args:
headless: boolean value indicating to set the headless option
Sample Code :
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
options = Options()
options.set_headless(headless=True)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path=r'C:\path\to\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get("http://google.com/")
print ("Headless Chrome Initialized")
driver.quit()
Note : --disable-gpu argument is implemented internally.
Original Answer of Mar 30 '2018
While working with Selenium Client 3.11.x, ChromeDriver v2.38 and Google Chrome v65.0.3325.181 in Headless mode you have to consider the following points :
You need to add the argument --headless to invoke Chrome in headless mode.
For Windows OS systems you need to add the argument --disable-gpu
As per Headless: make --disable-gpu flag unnecessary --disable-gpu flag is not required on Linux Systems and MacOS.
As per SwiftShader fails an assert on Windows in headless mode --disable-gpu flag will become unnecessary on Windows Systems too.
Argument start-maximized is required for a maximized Viewport.
Here is the link to details about Viewport.
You may require to add the argument --no-sandbox to bypass the OS security model.
Effective windows code block :
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
options = Options()
options.add_argument("--headless") # Runs Chrome in headless mode.
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox') # Bypass OS security model
options.add_argument('--disable-gpu') # applicable to windows os only
options.add_argument('start-maximized') #
options.add_argument('disable-infobars')
options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options, executable_path=r'C:\path\to\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get("http://google.com/")
print ("Headless Chrome Initialized on Windows OS")
Effective linux code block :
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
options = Options()
options.add_argument("--headless") # Runs Chrome in headless mode.
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox') # # Bypass OS security model
options.add_argument('start-maximized')
options.add_argument('disable-infobars')
options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options, executable_path='/path/to/chromedriver')
driver.get("http://google.com/")
print ("Headless Chrome Initialized on Linux OS")
Steps through YouTube Video
How to initialize Chrome Browser in Maximized Mode through Selenium
Outro
How to make firefox headless programmatically in Selenium with python?
tl; dr
Here is the link to the Sandbox story.
Update August 20, 2020 -- Now is simple!
chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.headless = True
self.driver = webdriver.Chrome(
executable_path=DRIVER_PATH, chrome_options=chrome_options)
UPDATED
It works fine in my case:
from selenium import webdriver
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.headless = True
driver = webdriver.Chrome(CHROMEDRIVER_PATH, options=options)
Just changed in 2020. Works fine for me.
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.
The .exe would be running anyway. According to Google - "Run in headless mode, i.e., without a UI or display server dependencies."
Better prepend 2 dashes to command line arguments, i.e. options.add_argument('--headless')
In headless mode, it is also suggested to disable the GPU, i.e. options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')
Try using ChromeDriverManager
from selenium import webdriver
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.set_headless()
browser =webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install(),chrome_options=chrome_options)
browser.get('https://google.com')
# capture the screen
browser.get_screenshot_as_file("capture.png")
Solutions above don't work with websites with cloudflare protection, example: https://paxful.com/fr/buy-bitcoin.
Modify agent as follows:
options.add_argument("user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4147.125 Safari/537.36")
Fix found here:
What is the difference in accessing Cloudflare website using ChromeDriver/Chrome in normal/headless mode through Selenium Python
from chromedriver_py import binary_path
chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_argument('--headless')
chrome_options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')
chrome_options.add_argument('--window-size=1280x1696')
chrome_options.add_argument('--user-data-dir=/tmp/user-data')
chrome_options.add_argument('--hide-scrollbars')
chrome_options.add_argument('--enable-logging')
chrome_options.add_argument('--log-level=0')
chrome_options.add_argument('--v=99')
chrome_options.add_argument('--single-process')
chrome_options.add_argument('--data-path=/tmp/data-path')
chrome_options.add_argument('--ignore-certificate-errors')
chrome_options.add_argument('--homedir=/tmp')
chrome_options.add_argument('--disk-cache-dir=/tmp/cache-dir')
chrome_options.add_argument('user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path = binary_path,options=chrome_options)
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver",
"D:\\Lib\\chrome_driver_latest\\chromedriver_win32\\chromedriver.exe");
ChromeOptions chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();
chromeOptions.addArguments("--allow-running-insecure-content");
chromeOptions.addArguments("--window-size=1920x1080");
chromeOptions.addArguments("--disable-gpu");
chromeOptions.setHeadless(true);
ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(chromeOptions);
chromeoptions=add_argument("--no-sandbox");
add_argument("--ignore-certificate-errors");
add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage'")
is not a supported browser
solution:
Open Browser ${event_url} ${BROWSER} options=add_argument("--no-sandbox"); add_argument("--ignore-certificate-errors"); add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage'")
don't forget to add spaces between ${BROWSER} options
There is an option to hide the chromeDriver.exe window in alpha and beta versions of Selenium 4.
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service as ChromeService # Similar thing for firefox also!
from subprocess import CREATE_NO_WINDOW # This flag will only be available in windows
chrome_service = ChromeService('chromedriver', creationflags=CREATE_NO_WINDOW)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=chrome_service) # No longer console window opened, niether will chromedriver output
You can check it out from here. To pip install beta or alpha versions, you can do "pip install selenium==4.0.0.a7" or "pip install selenium==4.0.0.b4" (a7 means alpha-7 and b4 means beta-4 so for other versions you want, you can modify the command.) To import a specific version of a library in python you can look here.
Update August 2021:
The fastest way to do is probably:
from selenium import webdriver
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.set_headless = True
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
options.headless = True is deprecated.
This is what I have:
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
How can I let the geckodriver open minimized or hidden?
You have to set the firefox driver options to headless so that it opens minimized. Here is the code to do that.
fireFoxOptions = webdriver.FirefoxOptions()
fireFoxOptions.set_headless()
driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_options=fireFoxOptions)
If this doesn't work for you there are other methods that you can use. Check out this other SO question for those: How to make firefox headless programmatically in Selenium with python?
geckodriver
geckodriver in it's core form is a proxy for using W3C WebDriver-compatible clients to interact with Gecko-based browsers.
This program provides the HTTP API described by the WebDriver protocol to communicate with Gecko browsers, such as Firefox. It translates calls into the Firefox remote protocol by acting as a proxy between the local- and remote ends.
So more or less it acts like a service. So the question to minimize the GeckoDriver shouldn't arise.
Minimizing Mozilla Firefox browser
The Selenium driven GeckoDriver initiated firefox Browsing Context by default opens in semi maximized mode. Perhaps while executing tests with the browsing context being minimized would be against all the best practices as Selenium may loose the focus over the Browsing Context and an exception may raise during the Test Execution.
However, Selenium's python client does have a minimize_window() method which eventually minimizes the Chrome Browsing Context effectively.
Solution
You can use the following solution:
Firefox:
from selenium import webdriver
options = webdriver.FirefoxOptions()
options.binary_location = r'C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe'
driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_options=options, executable_path=r'C:\WebDrivers\geckodriver.exe')
driver.get('https://www.google.co.in')
driver.minimize_window()
Chrome:
from selenium import webdriver
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("--start-maximized")
options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches", ["enable-automation"])
options.add_experimental_option('useAutomationExtension', False)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options, executable_path=r'C:\Utility\BrowserDrivers\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get('https://www.google.co.in')
driver.minimize_window()
Reference
You can find a detailed relevant discussion in:
How to Minimize browser window in selenium webdriver 3
tl; dr
How to make firefox headless programmatically in Selenium with python?
def __init__(self):
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("user-data-dir=bot_data")
options.add_argument("--headless") # Runs Chrome in headless mode.
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox') # Bypass OS security model
options.add_argument('--disable-gpu') # applicable to windows os only
options.add_argument('start-maximized') #
options.add_argument('disable-infobars')
options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")
# self.driver = webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install(), options=options)
self.driver = webdriver.Chrome('chromedriver.exe',
options=options)
self.driver.get('https://www.google.com')
self.wait = WebDriverWait(self.driver, 10)
There is have my codes. I want to change it to headless browser. But i am getting an error.
I added screenshot to show error.
This error message...
ERROR:devtools_http_handler.cc(288)] Error writing DevTools active port to file
...implies that there was an error while writing DevTools active port to the required file.
As per the discussion in How to open a Chrome Profile through Python instead of specifying only the directory name through user-data-dir, you need to pass the absolute path of the user-data-dir.
Solution
So you need to replace the line of code:
options.add_argument("user-data-dir=bot_data")
With:
options.add_argument("user-data-dir=C:\\Users\\AtechM_03\\AppData\\Local\\Google\\Chrome\\User Data\\bot_data")
Reference
You can find a couple of relevant discussions in:
How to use Chrome Profile in Selenium Webdriver Python 3
Selenium: Point towards default Chrome session
Outro
A couple of relevant documentations:
Session isolation in Headless Chrome
headless: Introduce a browser context
Save and restore browser sessions
Headless maintains a different profile folder structure to headful
I'm using Chrome with Selenium in Python 2.7.
I've tried to run Chrome in headless mode but it slows down my tests significantly.
One workaround shall be to disable the proxy settings but I don't know how to do it in python.
This is my code so far:
from selenium import webdriver
chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")
chrome_options.add_argument('headless')
chrome_options.add_argument('--hide-scrollbars')
chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')
chrome_options.add_argument('???') # which option?
self.driver = webdriver.Chrome("C:\Python27\Scripts\chromedriver.exe", chrome_options=chrome_options)
Does anyone know how to solve this?
Try this:
chrome_options.add_argument('--no-proxy-server')