I’ve been working with Protractor for my e2e tests and everything runs fine when I use Chrome as my browser. Now I want to run my tests in headless mode to speed things up and make them work better in CI environments. I tried setting up PhantomJS but ran into issues and couldn’t get it working properly. Are there other headless options that work well with Protractor? I’m looking for a reliable setup that someone has actually used successfully. Any working configuration examples would be really helpful since the documentation seems a bit outdated on this topic.
PhantomJS is dead, so smart move dropping it. I’ve run headless Chrome with Protractor in production for a year - handles everything regular Chrome tests do. Hard lesson learned: add --window-size=1920,1080 to Chrome options. Some tests fail without proper viewport dimensions in headless mode. You might need --disable-extensions too if you’re getting weird timeouts. One gotcha - file downloads work differently in headless mode. If your tests download files, configure the download directory explicitly. Chrome headless has been rock solid though. Our CI pipeline runs way cleaner now.
Switched from PhantomJS to Chrome headless two years ago - best decision ever. In your protractor.conf.js, you’ll want --no-sandbox, --disable-dev-shm-usage, and --headless. Those extra flags stop crashes in CI environments like Jenkins or GitLab where sandboxing breaks things. Throw in --disable-gpu for Linux servers too. Performance boost is real - my tests run 30% faster than regular Chrome. Firefox headless works great if you need cross-browser testing, just swap browserName to ‘firefox’ and add the headless config.
totally agree! chrome headless has been super stable for me too. just make sure to update the protractor setup in protractor.conf.js with --headless. way better than phantomjs, which just gave me too many headaches.