Headless Chromium allows running Chromium in a headless/server environment. Expected use cases include loading web pages, extracting metadata (e.g., the DOM) and generating bitmaps from page contents -- using all the modern web platform features provided by Chromium and Blink.
As of M118, precompiledheadless_shell binaries are available for download under the namechrome-headless-shell viaChrome for Testing infrastructure.
As of M132, headless shell functionality is no longer part of the Chrome binary, so --headless=old has no effect. If you are using old Headless functionality you should now migrate tochrome-headless-shell.Read more.
There are two ways to use Headless Chromium:
--headless command line flag:$ chrome--headless--remote-debugging-port=9222 https://chromium.org/
chrome://inspect/ in another instance of Chrome.For example, thechrome-remote-interface Node.js package can be used to extract a page's DOM like this:
const CDP= require('chrome-remote-interface');(async()=>{ let client;try{// Connect to browser client= await CDP();// Extract used DevTools domains.const{Page,Runtime}= client;// Enable events on domains we are interested in. awaitPage.enable(); awaitPage.navigate({url:'https://example.com'}); awaitPage.loadEventFired();// Evaluate outerHTML after page has loaded.const expression={expression:'document.body.outerHTML'};const{ result}= awaitRuntime.evaluate(expression); console.log(result.value);}catch(err){ console.error('Cannot connect to browser:', err);} finally{if(client){ await client.close();}}})();
Alternatvely, thePuppeteer Node.js package can be used to communicate with headless, for example:
import puppeteer from'puppeteer';(async()=>{const browser= await puppeteer.launch({headless:'shell'});const page= await browser.newPage(); await page.goto('https://example.com');const title= await page.evaluate(()=> document.title); console.log(title); await browser.close();})();
Mailing list:headless-dev@chromium.org
Bug tracker:Internals>Headless
File a new bug (bit.ly/2pP6SBb)