How to start Chrome headless with user-data-dir flag with ChromeDriver version 83.0.4103.39 and Selenium

Question

Code

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();

options.AddArguments("--headless");
options.AddArguments("--disable-gpu");
options.AddArguments("--disable-software-rasterizer");
options.AddArguments("--user-data-dir=/profiles/" + profile);
options.AddArguments("--disable-software-rasterizer");
options.AddArguments("--window-size=1920x1080");
options.AddArguments("--disable-extensions");
options.AddArguments("--disable-plugins-discovery");

IWebDriver webDriver = new ChromeDriver(options);
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(webDriver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(15));
webDriver.Navigate().GoToUrl(@"someUrl"); ---> Here code stucks

Error:

OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriverException: 'The HTTP request to the remote WebDriver server for URL http://localhost:64225/session timed out after 60 seconds.'

I also tried

options.AddArguments("--disable-dev-shm-usage");
options.AddArguments("--no-sandbox");

Console output

"A cookie associated with a cross-site resource at 
<SomeSite> was set without the `SameSite` attribute. 
A future release of Chrome will only deliver cookies 
with cross-site requests if they are set with 
`SameSite=None` and `Secure`. You can review cookies 
in developer tools under Application>Storage>Cookies 
and see more details at 
https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5088147346030592 and https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5633521622188032.", 
source: <someURL> (0)

Answer 1

This error message...

OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriverException: 'The HTTP request to the remote WebDriver server for URL http://localhost:64225/session timed out after 60 seconds.

...implies that the ChromeDriver was unable to initiate/spawn a new Browsing Context i.e. Chrome Browser session using the desired Chrome Profile.

As per the discussion in How to open a Chrome Profile through --user-data-dir argument of Selenium instead of specifying only the directory name through user-data-dir, you need to pass the absolute path of the user-data-dir.

---

Solution

So you need to replace the line of code:

options.add_argument("user-data-dir=bot_data")

With:

options.add_argument("user-data-dir=C:\\Users\\AtechM_03\\AppData\\Local\\Google\\Chrome\\User Data\\bot_data")

---

Reference

You can find a couple of relevant discussions in:

• How to use Chrome Profile in Selenium Webdriver Python 3
• Selenium: Point towards default Chrome session

---

Outro

A couple of relevant documentations:

• Session isolation in Headless Chrome
• headless: Introduce a browser context
• Save and restore browser sessions
• Headless maintains a different profile folder structure to headful