Ask HN: What are you using headless Chrome for?

#1

Post by cptnntsoobv » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: What are you using headless Chrome for?

#2

Post by eberkund » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

I used it for creating PDFs at my last job.

Re: Ask HN: What are you using headless Chrome for?

#3

Post by jmnicolas » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

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

Re: Ask HN: What are you using headless Chrome for?

#4

Post by pkz » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 8:16 PM UTC

I use it to archive complex web pages.

Re: Ask HN: What are you using headless Chrome for?

#5

Post by jamieweb » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

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

Re: Ask HN: What are you using headless Chrome for?

#6

Post by cjfont » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 11:58 PM UTC

eberkund wrote: post #2

I used it for creating PDFs at my last job.

I use currently use puppeteer to do the same thing

Re: Ask HN: What are you using headless Chrome for?

#7

Post by matt_f » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 1:17 AM UTC

jmnicolas wrote: post #3

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

*scrape

Re: Ask HN: What are you using headless Chrome for?

#8

Post by digianarchist » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 1:20 AM UTC

eberkund wrote: post #2

I used it for creating PDFs at my last job.

We've done this. You can run it in AWS lambda.

Re: Ask HN: What are you using headless Chrome for?

#9

Post by jjeaff » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 1:41 AM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: What are you using headless Chrome for?

#10

Post by doopy1 » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 1:54 AM UTC

jamieweb wrote: post #5

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

Mind sharing your script?