How to launch web driver chrome without opening a browser window (i.e. in the background)?

Question

Python

Hey!
When writing the parser, I used Selenium with webbriver Chrome. Everything works fine, but at startup it opens a browser window. The code is the following:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from time import sleep
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import Select
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

browser = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=chrome_options) 
browser.get('https://www.itau.com.br')

To run it in the background, I read that you need to run a virtual display, did:

display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
display.start()

But the Chrome window still pops out! Found that you can add the option "do not open the window", added:

chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument("--no-startup-window")

This is where the error started popping up:

browser = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=chrome_options) 
  File "/Users/Lutchenko/Library/Enthought/Canopy_64bit/User/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/chrome/webdriver.py", line 69, in __init__
    desired_capabilities=desired_capabilities)
  File "/Users/Lutchenko/Library/Enthought/Canopy_64bit/User/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 92, in __init__
    self.start_session(desired_capabilities, browser_profile)
  File "/Users/Lutchenko/Library/Enthought/Canopy_64bit/User/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 179, in start_session
    response = self.execute(Command.NEW_SESSION, capabilities)
  File "/Users/Lutchenko/Library/Enthought/Canopy_64bit/User/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 236, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
  File "/Users/Lutchenko/Library/Enthought/Canopy_64bit/User/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 192, in check_response
    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: unknown error: unable to discover open pages
  (Driver info: chromedriver=2.27.440174 (e97a722caafc2d3a8b807ee115bfb307f7d2cfd9),platform=Mac OS X 10.12.2 x86_64)

Any idea why it pops up or some other way to hide the window or run it in the background?

Answer 1

In general, having rummaged fairly on the Internet, I realized that, for now, it is impossible to run Chrome with Selenium in headless mode (that is, in the background) on Mac OS , but soon such an opportunity will appear. Same story with Firefox. I put Ubuntu for tests.

Answer 2

In general, Selenium seems to be more for testing. Check out Scrapy .