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

HartleySan picture HartleySan · Jul 28, 2017 · Viewed 29.8k times · Source

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.

Answer

Marrix picture Marrix · May 13, 2018

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.