Headless mode 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. To use headless, start Chrome with a command line flag: $ chrome --headless --remote-debugging-port=9222 https://chromium.org

Demo

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6biclFh0i0

Documentation

• https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome
• https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/06/headless-karma-mocha-chai
• https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/headless/README.md

Status in Chromium

Blink components: Internals>Headless

Enabled by default (tracking bug) in:

• Chrome for desktop release 59

Consensus & Standardization

• Firefox: Shipped/Shipping
• Edge: No signal
• Safari: No signal
• Web Developers: Positive

Owner

• skyostil@chromium.org

Comments

Available for Linux, Mac and Windows. Allow Window support landed in M59, M60 fixed several bugs. Puppeteer is a Node library that works with headless: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/puppeteer/

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Last updated on 2020-11-09