Opening/Closing headless Chrome with python

Question

I am writing a python script which utilises the Chrome Devtools protocol (I am using the Python wraper PyChromeDevTools headless Chrome, but I need to have an instance of Chrome already running. I would like the script to launch a headless Chrome instance, at the beggining, and close it at the end.

I have tried this:

import subprocess
CHROME_PATH=r'C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome'

chrome_args=[CHROME_PATH,
             '--headless',
             '--disable-gpu',
             '--remote-debugging-port=7912',
             r'https://www.youtube.com/',]

cmd=r" ".join(chrome_args)  

subprocess.call(cmd)

This seems to work (if I navigate to localhost:7912 I see that headless Chrome has started and there is a tab opened with https://www.youtube.com and also a worker pid (which disappears when I kill the python process). But the python script just hangs there, it doesn't continue to run the rest of the script.

How can I launch headless Chrome so that the script continues. Also, how can I kill this process when I have finished with it?

(If I run the same script, but don't ask for Chrome to be headless, the script continues as expected).

nnnmmm · Accepted Answer · 2017-12-21 15:17:58Z

2

You'll want p = subprocess.Popen(chrome_args). Unlike subprocess.call, this doesn't wait for the spawned process to terminate, and just runs it in the background. Be advised, however, that if your script finishes, Chrome might be killed too. So you could either wait for Chrome to terminate with p.wait or stall the script with e.g. input().

answered Dec 21, 2017 at 15:17

nnnmmm

8,9544 gold badges32 silver badges48 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

1 Comment

tim-mccurrach Over a year ago

Brilliant thanks. Been trying to figure this out for ages. Annoying there was such a simple solution. Thanks :)

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Opening/Closing headless Chrome with python

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related