Starting Meteor with Velocity test without the Chrome pop-up

Question

In my quest to gather knowledge about how to use Velocity, I ran across a snippet that mentioned a shell variable to set the browser Velocity used to run Karma in PhantomJS as apposed to creating a Chrome window pop-up each time I run my app in DEV-mode. At the time I shrugged it off, but after having implemented some testing in two of my apps, I can say it's an annoying pain to have the tests running in a pop-up window.

Does someone know if how one might get the tests running such that they run in PhantomJS and not in a Chrome pop-up windows? I thought the variable was something like VELOCITY_BROWSER=PhantomJS, but that doesn't seem to work. Also, is there a way to setup Meteor so that it simply sets this as a default so I don't have to create the variable each time, like in a config or something?

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 31 '15 at 12:52

9

I found the answer for those that find this and were also wondering how to prevent the Karma popup.

I am using the sanjo:jasmine test suite, which uses Karma for the client integration tests. You can set the default browser to PhantomJS by simply adding this to your environment when you run meteor:

JASMINE_BROWSER=PhantomJS

Or, if you just want to turn off client integration tests altogether simply adding this:

JASMINE_CLIENT_UNIT=0

So, for instance you can run your app like JASMINE_BROWSER=PhantomJS meteor, and you will not get the popup any longer. What I did was created a meteor.sh in my app root folder that I use to launch with environment variables like so:

#!/bin/sh
JASMINE_BROWSER=PhantomJS meteor

This is only for convenience so I wouldn't have to remember the variable to do this. This should work on any *nix-based OS. You could also make an alias if you wanted. It would look something like:

alias meteor=JASMINE_BROWSER=PhantomJS meteor

I may be slightly off in the syntax, but I think that should work.

To use PhantomJS you do need to have it installed, so run this in a terminal:

npm install -g phantomjs

Or, if you are on a Mac run (you will need brew installed):

brew install phantomjs

Hope this helps someone in the future.

answered Jan 31 '15 at 12:52

CodeChimp

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This! A thousand times this! Thanks! – tolmark Feb 25 '15 at 22:16
In reading through the Jasmine issues it seems like the author is planning to make PhantomJS the default, so this may now be needed morning forward. In the meantime, I have been starting everything using my shell script, and in fact modified it to be a little more "robust" by changing it to read `JASMINE_BROWSER=PhantomJS meteor $@`. This way any arguments passed to it will be simply passed on to the meteor call. You could also modify this to set any other setting you might need as well. – CodeChimp Feb 26 '15 at 04:35
1

(OSX)Additional, if for some reason like in my case the Log tells you that it can't find a `phantomjs` executable you would need to set the `PHANTOMJS_BIN`. I installed phantomjs using homebrew so the updated alias command can look like this: `alias phantommeteor="PHANTOMJS_BIN=\"/usr/local/bin/phantomjs\" JASMINE_BROWSER=PhantomJS meteor"` – Codebryo Aug 04 '15 at 09:14
For debugging it's useful to look at the log file which for me was located at `/.meteor/local/log/jasmine-client-integration.log`. This is how I found out I needed to set `PHANTOMJS_BIN`. – Tim Fletcher Aug 25 '15 at 19:49

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 19 '15 at 14:13

In sanjo:jasmine 0.17.0 on Windows, PhantomJS has some issues with meteor's autoupdate feature. You may have problems with re-running tests when you change the app's code.

If you'd like to stick with Chrome window, it can be somewhat hid by using chrome's commandline options, but you'd need to update karma-chrome-launcher\index.js to include these:

return [
  '--user-data-dir=' + this._tempDir,
  '--no-default-browser-check',
  '--no-first-run',
  '--disable-default-apps',
  '--disable-popup-blocking',
  '--disable-translate',
  '--window-position=-800,0',    // <-- added
  '--window-size=800,600'        // <-- added
].concat(flags, [url])

The window will show up, but will be created off-screen, and somehow luckily doesn't even steal the keyboard focus.

Starting Meteor with Velocity test without the Chrome pop-up

2 Answers2