Eric Bidelman has documented some of the common workflows possible with headless Chrome over in https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome.
If you're looking at this in 2016 and beyond, I strongly recommend investigating real headless Chrome: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/headless/README.md
Windows and Mac users might find using Justin Ribeiro's Docker setup useful here while full support for these platforms is being worked out.