Running Chrome browser in headless mode using Selenium WebDriver

Other Questions Headless Browser
1

I have a working Selenium script that opens Chrome and navigates to web pages. The problem is that I can see the browser window opening every time my script runs. I want to make the browser run in the background without showing any visible window.

Here’s what I’m currently using:

const { Builder } = require('selenium-webdriver');
const chrome = require('selenium-webdriver/chrome');
const chromedriver = require('chromedriver');

const serviceBuilder = new chrome.ServiceBuilder(chromedriver.path);
chrome.setDefaultService(serviceBuilder.build());

const browser = new Builder()
  .forBrowser('chrome')
  .build();

browser.get('https://www.example.com/profile/john-doe');
browser.getTitle().then(function(pageTitle) {
  console.log(pageTitle);
});

How can I modify this code to run Chrome in headless mode so the browser window stays hidden during execution?

2

You’ll need to set a window size when running headless - there’s no default viewport. I ran into this when my scripts started breaking because elements weren’t rendering right. Add --window-size=1920,1080 to your Chrome options with the headless flag. If you’re on Linux servers or containers, throw in --no-sandbox and --disable-dev-shm-usage too - prevents memory issues that crash headless sessions. Without proper window dimensions, responsive sites act weird and your selectors won’t work.

3

You need to create a chrome options object and pass it to the builder. Here’s the fix:

const options = new chrome.Options();
options.addArguments('--headless');
options.addArguments('--disable-gpu'); // recommended for headless

const browser = new Builder()
  .forBrowser('chrome')
  .setChromeOptions(options)
  .build();

I’ve used this setup for months in production - works great. The disable-gpu flag isn’t always needed but prevents rendering issues on some systems. Just make sure you’re importing the Options class correctly or you’ll get undefined errors.

4

just add the headless option to your chrome options first. do options.addArguments('--headless') then pass it to the builder with .setChromeOptions(options). worked great for me!