e2e tests with Protractor using Phantom.js

Question

I'm reading this Angular tutorial and in the first chapter they explained how to run unit and e2e tests. In the tutorial they use Chrome and Firefox. Since I run application on Ubuntu 14 virtual machine with no GUI I decided to use Phantomjs browser.

Eventually I was able to run unit tests with Phantom, but I have problems with e2e.

This is how protractor-conf.js looks like:

exports.config = {
allScriptsTimeout: 11000,

specs: [
'e2e/*.js'
],

  capabilities: {
    'browserName': 'phantomjs',
    'phantomjs.binary.path':'./node_modules/phantomjs/bin/phantomjs',
    'phantomjs.ghostdriver.cli.args': ['--loglevel=DEBUG']
  },

  chromeOnly:true,

  baseUrl: 'http://localhost:8000/',

  framework: 'jasmine',

  jasmineNodeOpts: {
defaultTimeoutInterval: 30000
}
};

But when I run tests there is a following error:

Starting selenium standalone server...
[launcher] Running 1 instances of WebDriver
[launcher] Process exited with error code 1

events.js:72
    throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
          ^
Error: spawn ENOENT
at errnoException (child_process.js:988:11)
at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (child_process.js:779:34)
npm ERR! weird error 8
npm WARN This failure might be due to the use of legacy binary "node"
npm WARN For further explanations, please read
/usr/share/doc/nodejs/README.Debian

npm ERR! not ok code 0

Did I miss something in configuration? How to get more detailed error description in this case?

What version of node are you using `node --version` and what version of protractor? — martin770, Jan 13 '16 at 20:51
Could be related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21072439/protractor-0-16-1-e2e-angularjs-starting-selenium-standalone-server-events. — alecxe, Jan 13 '16 at 22:42
@martin770 Node version is v0.10.25. Protractor version is 2.5.1. — Tamara, Jan 14 '16 at 14:06
That version of node should be compatible with that version of protractor, I've used that same configuration before but not with phantomJS. Unless you really need phantom, I would suggesting using xvfb-run for a virtual display and chrome for your browser. — martin770, Jan 14 '16 at 14:25

Tamara · Answer 1 · 2016-01-14T19:14:23.910

This particular problem (weird error 8) can be solved by installing java:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

However, I still can not run tests because another issue occurred. In my case it is:

UnknownError: Error communicating with the remote browser. It may have died.

It looks like using phantomjs is a road paved with tortures, maybe I should try firefox with xvfb like @martin770 suggested.

UPD

This post can be helpful too if you are running in a problem with dying phantom.js https://gist.github.com/tfnico/8471223

User barzik advised to add the following command to the beforeEach:

browser.ignoreSynchronization = true; 
browser.get('/');  //or any page you are going to test 
browser.waitForAngular();

e2e tests with Protractor using Phantom.js

1 Answers1