Headless mode not working

[Oggy16]

Hi,

I've just done a fresh install of Chromium and WWW-Mechanize-Chrome (from CPAN). I am testing the install with the following code:

use Log::Log4perl qw(:easy);
use WWW::Mechanize::Chrome;

Log::Log4perl->easy_init($ERROR);  # Set priority of root logger to ERROR
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize::Chrome->new(
    headless => 1,
    launch_exe => '/usr/local/bin/chrome',
);
$mech->get('https://google.com');
print "Browser Version: ".$mech->browser_version()."\n";   

I found that when I ran the above on a machine with no X server Perl would hang forever, no errors being printed.

I then tried running on a machine with a running X server, and despite "headless => 1" being set the chrome browser window would pop up, then the code would execute correctly.

Setting "headless => 0" or "headless => 1" makes no difference, in both cases the browser window pops up.

If I unset my DISPLAY variable so that the browser window cannot start then the below happens depending on the headless setting:

• If "headless => 1", then the script will hang forever
• If "headless => 0", then it terminates with the following error: Could not read websocket endpoint from Chrome output. Do you maybe have a non-debug instance of Chrome already running? at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/WWW/Mechanize/Chrome.pm line 1096.

With debug logging enabled, running with "headless => 1" and no X server I get the following:

2024/11/05 18:25:13 Spawning for websocket $VAR1 = [
          '/usr/local/bin/chrome',
          '--remote-debugging-port=0',
          '--remote-allow-origins=*',
          '--remote-debugging-address=127.0.0.1',
          '--no-first-run',
          '--mute-audio',
          '--no-default-browser-check',
          '--no-sandbox',
          '--safebrowsing-disable-auto-update',
          '--disable-background-networking',
          '--disable-background-timer-throttling',
          '--disable-backgrounding-occluded-windows',
          '--disable-breakpad',
          '--disable-default-apps',
          '--disable-dev-shm-usage',
          '--disable-domain-reliability',
          '--disable-gpu',
          '--disable-ipc-flooding-protection',
          '--disable-client-side-phishing-detection',
          '--disable-component-update',
          '--disable-hang-monitor',
          '--disable-popup-blocking',
          '--disable-prompt-on-repost',
          '--disable-renderer-backgrounding',
          '--disable-sync',
          '--disable-translate',
          '--disable-web-resources',
          '--headless',
          'about:blank'
        ];
2024/11/05 18:25:13 Spawned child as 38642, communicating via websocket
2024/11/05 18:25:13 Connecting to ws://127.0.0.1:32288/devtools/browser/4d12a239-1e8d-4b14-9aa3-b5193c47c9ba
2024/11/05 18:25:28 Connection closed

I checked my process list and Chrome carried on running after "Connection closed" for a while, then it terminated while Perl did not.

My Chromium version: Chrome/129.0.6668.100
WWW-Mechanize-Chrome library version: 0.73
OS: FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p5

Do let me know if you need any more info.