How do I use Headless Chrome in Chrome 60 on Windows 10?

user_1992973 0
Viewed 37673

I've been looking at the following article about Headless Chrome:
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome

I just upgraded Chrome on Windows 10 to version 60, but when I run either of the following commands from the command line, nothing seems to happen:

chrome --headless --disable-gpu --dump-dom https://www.google.com/
chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf https://www.google.com/

And I'm running all of these commands from the following path (the default installation path for Chrome on Windows):

C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\

When I run the commands, something seems to process for a second, but I don't actually see anything. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks.

Edit:

As noted by Mark Rajcok, if you add --enable-logging to the --dump-dom command, it works. Also, the --print-to-pdf command works as well in Chrome 61.0.3163.79, but you'll probably have to specify a different path for the output file in order to have the necessary permissions to save it.

As such, the following two commands worked for me:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome" --headless --disable-gpu --enable-logging --dump-dom https://www.google.com/
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome" --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=D:\output.pdf https://www.google.com/

I guess the next step is being able to step through the dumped DOM like PhantomJS with DOM selectors and whatnot, but I suppose that's a separate question.

Edit #2:

For what it's worth, I recently came across a Node API for Headless Chrome called Puppeteer (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer), which is really easy to use and delivers all the power of Headless Chrome. If you're looking for an easy way to use Headless Chrome, I highly recommend it.

google-chrome-headless windows-10 headless-browser google-chrome command-line
7 Answers

This works for me:

start chrome --enable-logging --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=c:\misc\output.pdf https://www.google.com/

... but only with "start chrome" and "--enable-logging" and with a path (for the pdf) specified - and if the folder "misc" exists on the c-directory.

Addition: ... the path for the pdf - "c:\misc" above - can of course be replaced with any other folder/dir.

user_50948730

Current versions (68-70) seem to require --no-sandbox in order to run, without it they do absolutely nothing and hang in the background.

The full commands I use are:

chrome --headless --user-data-dir=tmp --no-sandbox --enable-logging --dump-dom https://www.google.com/ > file.html
chrome --headless --user-data-dir=tmp --no-sandbox --print-to-pdf=whatever.pdf https://www.google.com/

Using --no-sandbox is a pretty bad idea and you should use this only for websites you trust, but sadly it's the only way of making it work at all.

--user-data-dir=... uses the specified directory instead of the default one, which is likely already in use by your regular browser.

However, if you're trying to make a PDF from HTML, then this is fairly useless, since you can't remove header and footer (containing text like file:///...) and the only viable solution is to use Puppeteer.

user_3889940

I know this question is for Windows, but since Google gives this post as the first search result, here's what works on Mac:

Mac OS X

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --headless --dump-dom 'http://www.google.com'

Note you MUST put the http or it won't work.

Further tips

To indent the html (which is highly desirable in real pages that are bloated), use tidy:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --headless --dump-dom 'http://www.google.com' | tidy

You can get tidy with:

brew install tidy
user_7141120

If you want to dodge on the problem in general, and just use a service of some kind to do the work for you, I'm the author/founder of browserless which attempts to tackle running headless Chrome in a service-like fashion. Other than that it's pretty tough to keep up with the changes and making sure all the appropriate packages and resources are installed to get Chrome running, but definitely doable.

user_20556690

I solved it by running this (inside chrome.exe directory),

start-process chrome -ArgumentList "--enable-logging --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=c:\users\output.pdf https://www.google.com/"

you can choose your own path.print-to-pdf=<<custom path>>

user_95433510
Related