python - Headless Chrome Driver not working for Selenium

Question

I am current having an issue with my scraper when I set options.add_argument("--headless"). However, it works perfectly fine when it is removed. Could anyone advise how I can achieve the same results with headless mode?

Below is my python code:

from seleniumwire import webdriver as wireDriver
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
    
chromedriverPath = '/Users/applepie/Desktop/chromedrivermac'

    def scraper(search):

    mit = "https://orbit-kb.mit.edu/hc/en-us/search?utf8=?&query="  # Empty search on mit site
    mit += "+".join(search) + "&commit=Search"
    results = []

    options = Options()
    options.add_argument("--headless")
    options.add_argument("--window-size=1440, 900")
    driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path= chromedriverPath)

    driver.get(mit)
    # Wait 20 seconds for page to load
    timeout = 20
    try:
        WebDriverWait(driver, timeout).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CLASS_NAME, "header")))
        search_results = driver.find_element_by_class_name("search-results")
        for result in search_results.find_elements_by_class_name("search-result"):
            resultObject = {
                "url": result.find_element_by_class_name('search-result-link').get_attribute("href")
            }
            results.append(resultObject)
        driver.quit()
    except TimeoutException:
        print("Timed out waiting for page to load")
        driver.quit()

    return results

Here is also a screenshot of when I print(driver.page_source) after get():

Answer 1

This screenshot...

...implies that the Cloudflare have detected your requests to the website as an automated bot and subsequently denying you the access to the application.

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Solution

In these cases the a potential solution would be to use the undetected-chromedriver in headless mode to initialize the google-chrome-headless browsing context.

undetected-chromedriver is an optimized Selenium Chromedriver patch which does not trigger anti-bot services like Distill Network / Imperva / DataDome / Botprotect.io. It automatically downloads the driver binary and patches it.

• Code Block:

  import undetected_chromedriver as uc
  from selenium import webdriver
  
  options = webdriver.ChromeOptions() 
  options.headless = True
  driver = uc.Chrome(options=options)
  driver.get(url)
  

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References

You can find a couple of relevant detailed discussions in:

• Selenium app redirect to Cloudflare page when hosted on Heroku
• How to bypass being rate limited ..HTML Error 1015 using Python