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I'm trying to get a suite of integration specs running on a ubuntu server CI box using the headless gem, xvfb, and capybara-webkit for headless testing. Everything works beautifully on a local dev box, but things get interesting once moved over to the CI server.

In the spec helper there is a bit of code wrapping :js enabled integration specs within a headless block like so:

  config.around(:each, :js => true) do |example|
    Headless.ly &example 
  end

Like I said, this all works nicely on a local dev box. On CI, which is using the headless gem and xvfb as the same user for tests for a different project, attempting to run the integration specs results in the following error when the spec would need to instantiate a browser instance:

webkit_server: Fatal IO error: client killed

I've been trying to figure out what could be causing that error, but can't even find a trace of where that might have come from, or any other information to help debug the issue.

So far I've checked/tried the following:

  • CI user definitely has permissions to run xvfb
  • Running "Xvfb :99 -ac" as the CI user gives one warning about a not found font, no other issues

Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this, or where I could look for more info? I'm pretty stumped on this.

Thanks!

Chelsea
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3 Answers3

9

I'm not sure if this is entirely the right solution, but it seems to work for me. Instead of doing:

bundle exec spec

Run the command with Xvfb like so, and remove the use of the headless gem:

xvfb-run bundle exec spec

Seems a bit wrong, but it works.

Chelsea
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2

for me the following worked. I am not sure why missing "-a" fails to run xvfb. My build is running @javascript tests on ubuntu+jenkins CI now

DISPLAY=localhost:0.0 xvfb-run -a bundle exec cucumber
Ram on Rails
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1

Not sure this is related (I was using capybara-webkit instead of the Headless gem) but on my ubuntu instance (ubuntu lucid on ec2) I also needed to run:

sudo xhost +local:jenkins

to give the jenkins account permission to talk to xvfb. See: Cannot connect to X server :0.0 with a Qt application

Community
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gmcnaughton
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