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This tutorial explains the steps to run the Selenium tests for Chrome browser in headless mode. We are going to run the tests in Selenium 3.

There are 2 ways to add dependencies to the Selenium project.

1. Manually add the dependencies to the project.

Download Selenium Version from here

Download ChromeDriver Binary

Download the latest version of WebDriverManager

Once the Selenium and WebDriverManager folders are downloaded, unzip the folder. Once the zip file is extracted, reference these jar files in the project. For this, navigate to project properties and click Build Path-> Configure Build Path in Eclipse. Click “Add External Jars“. After clicking on the “Add External JARs“, selected all the extracted JARs. The JARs files are present in the project.

2. Add the below dependencies to pom.xml or build.gradle.

Add below dependencies to the project.

Selenium 3

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.seleniumhq.selenium/selenium-java -->
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
      <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
      <version>3.141.59</version>
    </dependency>

What is headless browser?

A headless browser is like any other browser, but without a Head/GUI (Graphical User Interface).  A headless browser is used to automate the browser without launching the browser. While the tests are running, we could not see the browser, but we can see the test results coming on the console.

Headless browser testing is generally faster when compared to actual UI testing as it doesn’t wait for the whole page to render before performing any action.

When we need to execute automated test cases remotely on a server or in any of the build and release pipelines for continuous integration servers like Gitlab or Jenkins, it is not always possible to install real browsers on such remote machines. We can use headless browsers to run automation tests efficiently.

It is easy to perform multi-tasking with a Headless browser. The browser or our machine can do anything else while the tests run in the background.

We know that to execute Selenium automation scripts on browsers like chrome or firefox, we must download the binary files of these drivers like chromedriver and geckodriver, etc. After this, we need to set the path to these binaries in the automation script or add the classpath location. Here, we want to execute Selenium WebDriver automation scripts on the Chrome browser, then you need first to download chromedriver.exe and then use the System.setProperty  method to set its path as follows:

	// Set the path of ChromeDriver
	System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver",
				"C:\\Users\\Vibha\\Software\\chromedriver_win32_98.0.4758.102\\chromedriver.exe");

The complete program looks like as shown below:

import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions;

public class ChromeOptionsHeadless1 {

	public static void main(String[] args) {

		// Set the path of ChromeDriver
		System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver",
				"C:\\Users\\Vibha\\Software\\chromedriver_win32_98.0.4758.102\\chromedriver.exe");

		// Create an object of Chrome Options class
		ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();

		// pass the argument –headless to Chrome Options class.
		options.addArguments("--headless");

		// Create an object of Chrome Driver class and pass the Chrome Options object as
		// an argument
		ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

		System.out.println("Executing Chrome Driver in Headless mode..");
		driver.get("https://duckduckgo.com/");

		System.out.println("Title of Page :" + driver.getTitle());
		System.out.println("Page URL  : " + driver.getCurrentUrl());

		// Close the driver
		driver.close();

	}
}

How to run headless Chrome Tests in Selenium using WebDriverManager?

WebDriverManager

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/io.github.bonigarcia/webdrivermanager -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>io.github.bonigarcia</groupId>
    <artifactId>webdrivermanager</artifactId>
    <version>5.1.0</version>
</dependency>

WebDriverManager has an automated way to download browser executables(exes) or binaries. It supports different browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Opera, or PhantomJS.

WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup: checks for the latest version of the specified WebDriver binary. If the binaries are not present on the machine, then it will download the WebDriver binaries. Next, it instantiates the Selenium WebDriver instance with the ChromeDriver.

import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions;

import io.github.bonigarcia.wdm.WebDriverManager;

public class ChromeOptionsHeadless2 {

	public static void main(String[] args) {

		// WebDriverManager downloads chrome browser executables or binaries.
		WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup();

		// Create an object of Chrome Options class
		ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();

		// pass the argument –headless to Chrome Options class.
		options.addArguments("--headless");

		// Create an object of Chrome Driver class and pass the Chrome Options object as
		// an argument
		ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

		System.out.println("Executing Chrome Driver in Headless mode..");
		driver.get("https://duckduckgo.com/");

		System.out.println("Title of Page :" + driver.getTitle());
		System.out.println("Page URL  : " + driver.getCurrentUrl());

		// Close the driver
		driver.close();

	}

}

Congratulations!! We are able to run Chrome tests in Selenium in headless mode.