--headless is not an option in Chrome WebDriver for Selenium

Question

I would like to have Selenium run a headless instance of Google Chrome to mine data from certain websites without the UI overhead. I downloaded the ChromeDriver executable from here and copied it to my current scripting directory.

The driver appears to work fine with Selenium and is able to browse automatically, however I cannot seem to find the headless option. Most online examples of using Selenium with headless Chrome go something along the lines of:

import os  
from selenium import webdriver  
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys  
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options  

chrome_options = Options()  
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")  
chrome_options.binary_location = '/Applications/Google Chrome   Canary.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome Canary'`    

driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=os.path.abspath(“chromedriver"),   chrome_options=chrome_options)  
driver.get("http://www.duo.com")` 

However when I inspect the possible arguments for the Selenium WebDriver using the command chromedriver -h this is what I get:

D:\Jobs\scripts>chromedriver -h
Usage: chromedriver [OPTIONS]

Options
  --port=PORT                     port to listen on
  --adb-port=PORT                 adb server port
  --log-path=FILE                 write server log to file instead of stderr, increases log level to INFO
  --log-level=LEVEL               set log level: ALL, DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, SEVERE, OFF
  --verbose                       log verbosely (equivalent to --log-level=ALL)
  --silent                        log nothing (equivalent to --log-level=OFF)
  --append-log                    append log file instead of rewriting
  --replayable                    (experimental) log verbosely and don't truncate long strings so that the log can be replayed.
  --version                       print the version number and exit
  --url-base                      base URL path prefix for commands, e.g. wd/url
  --whitelisted-ips               comma-separated whitelist of remote IP addresses which are allowed to connect to ChromeDriver

No --headless option is available.

Does the ChromeDriver obtained from the link above allow for headless browsing?

Answer 1

--headless is not argument for chromedriver but for Chrome. --headless Run chrome in headless mode, i.e., without a UI or display server dependencies. ChromeDriver is a separate executable that WebDriver uses to control Chrome and Webdriver is a a collection of language specific bindings to drive a browser.

I am able to run in headless mode with this set of options. I hope this will help:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium import webdriver
import requests
import re  
options = Options()
options.add_argument('--headless')
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')
browser = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)  # see edit for recent code change.
browser.implicitly_wait(20)

Update 12 Aug 2019:

old : browser = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)

new : browser = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)