HACKER Q&A
📣 cptnntsoobv

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.


  👤 enlightens Accepted Answer ✓
Generating 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.

👤 eberkund
I used it for creating PDFs at my last job.

👤 jjeaff
I 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.

👤 jmnicolas
I use it to get rendered web pages I want to scrap.

👤 mothinx
I use it for a trading bot on Fifa 2020 Fut mode

👤 jamieweb
I use it to test my Content-Security-Policy by crawling my whole site and capturing any violation reports that are sent.

👤 pkz
I use it to archive complex web pages.

👤 r0s
Automated testing.