Why doesn't instagram work with Selenium headless Chrome?

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I'm trying to build an insta bot that works headless, but it don't seem to find the username, password columns (i.e NoSuchElementException).

I tried to run this code to troubleshoot. (which basicaly opens the ig homepage and screenshots it)

from selenium import webdriver
from time import sleep

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.headless = True
options.add_argument("--window-size=1920,1080")
browser = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
browser.get("https://www.instagram.com")
browser.get_screenshot_as_file(f"screenshot.png")

and i got these screenshots basically saying 'error, retry after several minutes' in french

I tried finding the 'connectez-vous' button thru selenium, but every xpath i try doesn't work, and it's impossible to find it thru f12

The bot will be later uploaded to pythonanywhere so i can run it in the cloud (so if you think i might run into some other problems you can let me know)

What do you suggest me to do?

pythonanywhere selenium-chromedriver headless selenium python
1 Answers
from selenium import webdriver
from time import sleep

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
#options.headless = True
options.add_argument("--window-size=1920,1080")
options.add_argument("--headless")
options.add_argument("--disable-gpu")
options.add_argument(
    "user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.88 Safari/537.36")
browser = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
browser.get("https://www.instagram.com")
sleep(5)
#browser.refresh()
browser.get_screenshot_as_file(f"screenshot.png")

For headless chrome , useragent is set as chromeheadless or something , this makes instagram to detect that you are using headless chrome.

You can vent this by specifying hardcoded useragent,

open a normal chrome , goto network tab , open request header and copy the user agent part and replace in your code

Headless browser detection

user_67936370
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