Good afternoon,

I wanted to share my experience with setting up headless Chrome in a Docker container, which fixed my headless issue and helped with reCAPTCHA.

Steps I Followed:

1. I first ran some commands to ensure Google Chrome was installed:

   docker exec -it container_name /bin/bash
   

   Check if Google Chrome is installed by running:

   google-chrome --version
   

2. Then, I opened a Python shell:

   python
   

3. Next, I ran this code to take a screenshot of the Google homepage:

   from selenium import webdriver
   from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
   from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
   import time
   
   # Configure Chrome options to run headless
   chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
   chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")  # Run in headless mode
   chrome_options.add_argument("--no-sandbox")  # Bypass OS security model
   chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage")  # Overcome limited resource problems
   chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-gpu")  # Disable GPU (for headless stability)
   
   # Set up the WebDriver
   driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()), options=chrome_options)
   
   # Open a test page
   driver.get("https://www.google.com")
   
   # Wait for the page to load
   time.sleep(2)
   
   # Take a screenshot and save it to a file
   driver.save_screenshot("snapshot.png")
   
   print("Screenshot saved as snapshot.png")
   
   # Close the browser
   driver.quit()
   

4. I ran pwd to check my current directory and then downloaded the screenshot to my PC. If I was able to see the Google homepage, then Chrome was working fine.

5. If the above worked, I modified my Chrome options as follows to improve compatibility with reCAPTCHA:

   chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
   chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")  # Run in headless mode
   chrome_options.add_argument("--no-sandbox")  # Bypass OS security model
   chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage")  # Overcome limited resource problems
   chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-gpu")  # Disable GPU (for headless stability)
   
   # Add a common user-agent to mimic a real browser, especially in case of reCAPTCHA
   chrome_options.add_argument("user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36")
   
   # Disable automation flags to avoid detection by reCAPTCHA
   chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled")
   
   # Set up the WebDriver with the configured options
   driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()), options=chrome_options)
   

This should be fine. If you have any inquiries, message me. If it does not work, drop a comment on where you face challenges. Please don't minus my count. Thank you!