With either Chrome in headless mode, or "headless_shell" (a minimal Chrome app part of the Chromium source tree), you first enable the remote debugging port (vi

With either Chrome in headless mode, or "headless_shell" (a minimal Chrome app part of the Chromium source tree), you first enable the remote debugging port (via --remote-debugging-port=9222), and then you can then simply browse to http://localhost:9222/ http://localhost:9222/. That web page will list the various Chrome "pages" (ie, tabs) which you can then click on. Clicking on those tabs will open the Chrome DevTools inside of Chrome, as a web app served from http://localhost:9222/ http://localhost:9222/. This is the internal API that DevTools uses, and is what is referred to as the "Chrome Debugging Protocol" (ie, chromedp). Since 57+, the built in DevTools UI displays whatever the active viewport Chrome "sees" using the screencast APIs. It's just a PNG that's updated every couple hundred milliseconds with the output of Chrome's headless renderer.