I would like to create an automated program in python with the help of selenium that opens a website, navigates to a section where I press a button and downloads the data. If the program is not running in the background, it works fine (then I don't use the chrome_options.add_argument("--headless=old") ). If the website runs in the background, the program runs without error, but the data is not downloaded. I don't think
press the button.
I made the following chrome settings:
chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless=old") # "--headless" or "--headless=new" can't work
chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-gpu")
chrome_options.add_argument("--no-sandbox")
chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage")
chrome_options.add_argument("--window-size=1920,1080")
chrome_options.add_argument("--log-level=3")
chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")
...
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()), options=chrome_options)
driver.get(""https://www.example.com"")
time.sleep(1)
button press
...
button = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//*[@data-form-button="primary"]')
button.click()
or
button = wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, '//*[@id="dialog-region"]/form/div/footer/ul/li[2]/button')))
driver.execute_script("arguments[0].click();", button)
or
form = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//*[@id="dialog-region"]/form')
form.submit()
It's can't work.
When I use the next chrome setup:
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless") or chrome_options.add_argument("--headless=new") then a white panel appears until I close the program. The program only runs with the background open when I use "--headless=old". I use this for the button press:
button = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, '//*[@data-form-button="primary"]')
button.click()
Version of Chrome: 129.0.6668.101
Version of Selenium : 4.25.0
Operation system: Windows 10
Thank you in advance for your help.
Looks like downloads don't work in headless mode unless you set a download path via Chrome experimental options before initializing the driver: See implementation here
That being said, I would personally try to do this using http requests. Then you don't have to worry about the headaches of web automation (page flakiness, Selenium instability, the time to download the driver each time, etc)