Creating a headless Chrome instance in Python

Any reason you haven't considered Selenium with the Chrome Driver?

http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/ChromeDriver

http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/PythonBindings

While I'm the author of CasperJS, I invite you to check out Ghost.py, a webkit web client written in Python.

While it's heavily inspired by CasperJS, it's not based on PhantomJS — it still uses PyQt bindings and Webkit though.

I use this to get the driver:

def get_browser(storage_dir, headless=False):
    """
    Get the browser (a "driver").

    Parameters
    ----------
    storage_dir : str
    headless : bool

    Results
    -------
    browser : selenium webdriver object
    """
    # find the path with 'which chromedriver'
    path_to_chromedriver = '/usr/local/bin/chromedriver'

    from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
    chrome_options = Options()
    if headless:
        chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")
    chrome_options.add_experimental_option('prefs', {
        "plugins.plugins_list": [{"enabled": False,
                                  "name": "Chrome PDF Viewer"}],
        "download": {
            "prompt_for_download": False,
            "default_directory": storage_dir,
            "directory_upgrade": False,
            "open_pdf_in_system_reader": False
        }
    })

    browser = webdriver.Chrome(path_to_chromedriver,
                               chrome_options=chrome_options)
    return browser

By switching the headless parameter you can either watch it or not.

This question is 5 years old now and at the time it was a big challenge to run a headless chrome using python, but the good news is:

Starting from version 59, released in June 2017, Chrome comes with a headless driver, meaning we can use it in a non-graphical server environment and run tests without having pages visually rendered etc which saves a lot of time and memory for testing or scraping. Setting Selenium for that is very easy:

(I assume that you have installed selenium and chrome driver):

from selenium import webdriver

#set a headless browser
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('headless')
browser = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)

and now your chrome will run headlessly, if you take out options from the last line, it will show you the browser.