Headless Chrome Example

Description

This is a simple example of using the headless feature of Google Chrome/Chromium released somewhere around version 58.

client.py is a barebones Python interface to a Chrome instance. This is an asynchronous interface, mainly because it relies on websockets to communicate with the headless Chrome instance.

visit.py is a simple command line script for fetching a screenshot of a URL through the headless client, optionally over a VPN connection.

Each instance of the client is isolated from all other instances. A temporary user data directory is created and destroyed on every request, and the debugger ports used to communicate with the client instance are chosen at random.

Requirements

You'll need Google Chrome or Chromium >= v58. pip install -r requirements.txt should take care of the rest.

Running

Make sure the correct path to the Chrome executable is either changed in client.py or passed in.

Then you should just be able to run: python visit.py "https://cyber.harvard.edu/"

Screenshots will be saved in the results folder.

Tested Versions

This has been tested with Python 3.6 on Xubuntu 17.04 with Google Chrome versions 58-62.

Licence

See LICENCE