To install Chrome Canary, you can download it or install it with homebrew: This will change in the future and eventually The Chrome Dev Team will bring Chrome 59 into the main Chrome build. This means that right now, you need to install Chrome Canary if you want to use headless browsing. As of ApChrome Canary is the only channel that contains Chrome 59. Headless Chrome has been released in Chrome 59. What versions of Chrome supports headless browsing? Additionally, since Nightmare is Electron based, it has a different security model than Chrome and may fail to catch certain security issues during testing that would happen on a production. For example, in Nightmare (and any electron app), you would need to install a virtual display manager in order to run the application. Both have caveats when running on a shell-only system (one without an actual screen or window manager). With that said, some users have run into trouble working with PhantomJS and Nightmare.

If you have existing systems that are working using these tools, you can keep using them. Neither or these tools is going away (edit: the PhantomJS sole maintainer has resigned) and they’re still great solutions to scraping. Currently there are number of stable but informal solutions to scraping such as PhantomJS or NightmareJS (which is written in Electron).

This might seem like a trivial improvement but it is actually a huge step forward for scraping data from the web. Headless mode in Chrome is a new way to interact with websites without having to actually have a window up on the screen.

This walkthrough shows you how to get headless Chrome up and running on OSX and explains in detail how to use the code examples provided by the Chrome team. You can check your Chrome version in the menu under Help > About Google Chrome. EDIT: Headless Chrome is shipping in Chrome 59 so the need to use the full Canary path will eventually go away.

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