Headless browser options for Protractor testing?

Other Questions Headless Browser
1

Hey everyone,

I’ve been using Protractor for my testing, and it’s working great with Chrome. But now I’m trying to set up a headless browser for my tests. I’ve heard about PhantomJS, but I couldn’t get it to work.

Does anyone have experience running Protractor with a headless browser? I’d love to see some sample code or get recommendations for other headless options that play nice with Protractor.

Here’s a basic example of what I’m working with now:

describe('My App', function() {
  it('should have a title', function() {
    browser.get('http://myapp.com');
    expect(browser.getTitle()).toEqual('My Awesome App');
  });
});

How would I modify this to work with a headless browser? Any tips or tricks would be super helpful. Thanks!

2

hey, have u tried using headless chrome? its pretty easy to set up. just add some chrome options to ur protractor config like ‘–headless’ and ‘–disable-gpu’. no need to change ur test code. works great for me in our CI/CD setup. Jus remember headless can be a bit slower, so maybe increase ur timeouts a bit. good luck!

3

I’ve been using Protractor with headless Chrome for a while now, and it’s been a game-changer for our CI/CD pipeline. Here’s what worked for me:

First, make sure you have the latest version of Chrome and ChromeDriver installed. Then, in your Protractor config file, add these capabilities:

capabilities: {
  browserName: 'chrome',
  chromeOptions: {
    args: ['--headless', '--disable-gpu', '--window-size=1920,1080']
  }
}

This tells Protractor to use Chrome in headless mode. You don’t need to change your test code at all - it runs exactly the same as with a regular browser.

One tip: headless browsers can be finicky with certain UI interactions. If you’re having issues, try adding a small wait or using browser.sleep() before interacting with elements.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you run into any snags.

4

I’ve found that using Puppeteer with Protractor can be a great alternative for headless testing. It is more modern than PhantomJS and offers better compatibility with current web standards. In my experience, you can install Puppeteer via npm and then update your Protractor configuration by setting the browserName to ‘chrome’ and adding appropriate chromeOptions. This includes passing the ‘–headless’ argument and specifying the binary path using require(‘puppeteer’).executablePath(). This setup has been reliable in our CI/CD pipeline and works well with complex web apps. Additionally, increasing timeouts for certain operations is advisable, as headless environments may be slower than their headed counterparts.