Creating a headless Chrome instance in Python

Question

This question describes my conclusion after researching available options for creating a headless Chrome instance in Python and asks for confirmation or resources that descr

Answer 1

This question is 5 years old now and at the time it was a big challenge to run a headless chrome using python, but the good news is:

Starting from version 59, released in June 2017, Chrome comes with a headless driver, meaning we can use it in a non-graphical server environment and run tests without having pages visually rendered etc which saves a lot of time and memory for testing or scraping. Setting Selenium for that is very easy:

(I assume that you have installed selenium and chrome driver):

from selenium import webdriver

#set a headless browser
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('headless')
browser = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)

and now your chrome will run headlessly, if you take out options from the last line, it will show you the browser.