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Ask HN: What are you using headless Chrome for?
The headless version of chrome has seen great adoption since it was launched 4-5 years ago. I am wondering what types of use cases it is being used for.
Running automated tests is one the most common use cases I am familiar with. Are there any other purposes folks are using it for?
I am also curious about large scale cloud deployments use cases for headless chrome that the HN crowd might be aware of.
- eberkund 6y agoI used it for creating PDFs at my last job.
- cjfont 6y agoI use currently use puppeteer to do the same thing
- digianarchist 6y agoWe've done this. You can run it in AWS lambda.
- kypro 6y agoCould someone elaborate? How does this work? Do you create a HTML document then print the output as a PDF with headless Chrome?
- eberkund 6y agoYes exactly, HTML document using whatever templating language you want (or even client-side JavaScript framework since Chrome can handle that too) and then output a PDF.
- jmnicolas 6y agoI use it to get rendered web pages I want to scrap.
- matt_f 6y ago*scrape
- jamil7 6y agoI was doing the same for an article reader / archiver I built but it was slow. Did you ever figure out how to speed it up? Cancelling image and media requests helped but it increased the likelihood of being flagged as a bot.
- jmnicolas 6y agoSorry I never looked at the perf aspect of it since my needs were modest (less than 50 web pages per day). The first thing that would come to my mind is to parallelize it but then it's going to become pretty complex.
- pkz 6y agoI use it to archive complex web pages.
- jamieweb 6y agoI use it to test my Content-Security-Policy by crawling my whole site and capturing any violation reports that are sent.
- jjeaff 6y agoI use it to interface and download reports and other data on behalf of customers from sites that don't have any type of 3rd party api.
- mothinx 6y agoI use it for a trading bot on Fifa 2020 Fut mode
- joefarish 6y agoI imagine you don't want to share too much info about this, but I'd be interested in any more detail you are willing to share.
- enlightens 6y agoGenerating diagrams from Markdown files using the Mermaid JS library. They have a CLI but it's NPM based so you basically have to pick your poison as to what you'll be configuring. In my case Chrome made more sense.
- r0s 6y agoAutomated testing.
- kimown 6y agoGenerate videos.