I have a scraping script written in Ruby which uses Selenium, Watir and ChromeDriver, all is working just fine with a Chrome browser window, but trying to run in headless mode just hits;
Selenium::WebDriver::Error::UnknownError: unknown error: Element <input id="desired_element" type="checkbox" name="desired_element" checked="checked"> is not clickable at point (660, 594). Other element would receive the click: <html lang="en">...</html>
I'm using Watir 6.8 and latest Chromedriver 2.33.
Any ideas whats n=behind the different behavior of the page when in headless vs non headless, and how I can deal with this?
The error message is telling you what the problem is when it says "Other element would receive the click:"
This means some other element on the screen is covering the checkbox you are trying to interact with. Likely this is caused by whatever the default browser size in headless mode being different than the default size of your browser when it is run non-headless, resulting in a different arrangement of elements
We can verify if this is the case by asking the size of the window in both headless and normal modes and seeing if the resulting values are the same.
size = browser.window.size
puts "The browser window is #{size.width} wide by #{size.height} high"
There are a few potential ways to solve this:
Specify or alter the browser 'window' size. for example
browser.window.resize_to 1024, 768
I prefer this, and normally have a command such as that to set the browser size right after it is initialized. Set either to the minimum supported size for your site, or the minimum recommended size
Use another means to 'click' on the checkbox, such as sending a space at it
@browser.checkbox(name: "desired_element").send_keys " "
I do not prefer this as it doesn't really solve the source of the problem and you may experience other similar issues interacting with other elements on the site as your script progresses.