Do headless web browser need selenium WebDriver?

Question

I am trying to use headless web browser(such as headless chrome) for our selenium tests.Should I have to use selenium WebDriver(for python or c# bindings)?

Answer 1

Headless Chrome

As per Getting Started with Headless Chrome the Headless Chrome is the server environment where you don't need a visible UI shell.

If you've got Chrome 59+ installed, you start Chrome with the --headless flag as follows:

chrome \
  --headless \                   # Runs Chrome in headless mode.
  --disable-gpu \                # Temporarily needed if running on Windows.

chrome should always point to your installation of Chrome. The exact location of-coarse varies from platform to platform.

ChromeDriver

As per ChromeDriver - WebDriver for Chrome, in simple words WebDriver is an open source tool for automated testing of webapps across many browsers which provides capabilities for navigating to web pages, user input, JavaScript execution, and much more. ChromeDriver is the standalone server which implements WebDriver's wire protocol for Chromium.

Conclusion

If you intend to use Chrome Browser in Headless Mode(i.e. Headless Chrome) for your selenium tests you have to mandatorily use ChromeDriver

Answer 2

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
import os

Before we set up a Chrome web driver instance, we have to create an Options object that allows us to specify how exactly we want to launch Chrome. Let’s tell it that we want the browser to launch headless and that the window size should be set to 1920x1080. We also need ChromeDriver to be able to run Chrome at all 

chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")
chrome_options.add_argument("--window-size=1920x1080")

# download the chrome driver from https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads and put it in the
# current directory
chrome_driver = os.getcwd() +"\\chromedriver.exe"

driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=chrome_options, executable_path=chrome_driver)
driver.get("https://www.google.com")