A headless browser is a web browser without a graphical user interface (GUI). It runs in the background, controlled programmatically through code or command-line interfaces. Headless browsers can perform all standard browser operations like rendering web pages, executing JavaScript, and handling cookies, but without displaying any visual components.

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Common Use Cases

  • Web scraping and data extraction
  • Automated testing of web applications
  • Taking screenshots or generating PDFs of web pages
  • Performance monitoring and testing
  • Automation of repetitive web tasks

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Advantages

  • Reduced resource consumption (no GUI rendering required)
  • Faster execution than full browser instances
  • Ideal for server environments without display capabilities
  • Perfect for CI/CD pipelines and automated workflows
Headless browsers are commonly used in developer tools, testing frameworks, and automation services to interact with web content programmatically.

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Headless example

// SDK will prepare the browser and will start it on your machine then you can control it with puppeteer
import { GologinApi } from 'gologin';

const token = process.env.GL_API_TOKEN || 'your dev token here';
const gologin = GologinApi({
  token,
});

async function main() {
  const { browser } = await gologin.launch({
    extra_params: ['--headless'],
    // pass profileId parameter if you want to run particular profile
    // profileId: 'your profileId here',
  });

  const page = await browser.newPage();

  await page.goto('https://iphey.com/', { waitUntil: 'networkidle2' });
  const status = await page.$eval('.trustworthy:not(.hide)',
    (elt) => elt?.innerText?.trim(),
  );

  await new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, 10000));
  console.log('status', status);

  return status;
}

main().catch(console.error)
  .finally(gologin.exit);