Karma fails to launch IE on Team City build

Question

Karma is failing to launch IE when running under Team City. I can log onto the sever and run the tests from the command line, but IE always fails from Team City:

[Step 6/6] INFO [karma]: Karma v0.12.37 server started at http://localhost:9876/
[14:45:09][Step 6/6] INFO [launcher]: Starting browser Chrome
[14:45:09][Step 6/6] INFO [launcher]: Starting browser Firefox
[14:45:09][Step 6/6] INFO [launcher]: Starting browser IE
[14:45:25][Step 6/6] INFO [Firefox 38.0.0 (Windows 7 0.0.0)]: Connected on socket KeIupP7qx6Dn9ghM0KsX with id 75681035
[14:45:32][Step 6/6] INFO [Chrome 43.0.2357 (Windows 7 0.0.0)]: Connected on socket DORZdoNLQzPHx4ZT0KsY with id 61077412
[14:45:37][Step 6/6] INFO [IE 11.0.0 (Windows 7 0.0.0)]: Connected on socket 1p4cEWOQp6eKrUdO0KsZ with id 27572902
[14:45:47][Step 6/6] WARN [IE 11.0.0 (Windows 7 0.0.0)]: Disconnected (1 times), because no message in 10000 ms.
[14:45:47][Step 6/6] Chrome 43.0.2357 (Windows 7 0.0.0)
[14:45:47][Step 6/6] Firefox 38.0.0 (Windows 7 0.0.0)
[14:45:48][Step 6/6] Process exited with code 1

I tried increasing the browserNoActivityTimeout to 100000, but that didn't help.

We are running Team City 8.1.2 on Windows 2008 R2.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The issue was that IE had never been run under the service account we use for the Team City agent. It was getting stuck on the IE options dialog that opens when the browser is first run. Once I ran IE and accepted the default settings it runs on the build server:

INFO [karma]: Karma v0.12.37 server started at http://localhost:9876/
[09:58:42]INFO [launcher]: Starting browser Chrome
[09:58:42]INFO [launcher]: Starting browser Firefox
[09:58:42]INFO [launcher]: Starting browser IE
[09:59:02]INFO [Firefox 38.0.0 (Windows 7 0.0.0)]: Connected on socket 1uAt8J2B8NPFj66W8Mib with id 61577635
[09:59:02]INFO [IE 11.0.0 (Windows 7 0.0.0)]: Connected on socket RPZgBEUhUGW2wD2h8Mic with id 95872295
[09:59:07]INFO [Chrome 43.0.2357 (Windows 7 0.0.0)]: Connected on socket mZzpKwFkIPpGY3vC8Mid with id 7944928
[09:59:08]Chrome 43.0.2357 (Windows 7 0.0.0)
[09:59:08]Firefox 38.0.0 (Windows 7 0.0.0)
[09:59:08]IE 11.0.0 (Windows 7 0.0.0)
[09:59:08]Process exited with code 0

Answer 2

@Kevin Kuszyk, your solution worked for me as well.

The problem is that Internet Explorer 11 shows a dialog window the first time it's started for each user that starts it.

Solution: Manually start IE as the TeamCity user.

In order to start Internet Explorer as the service user that you configured to run TeamCity, shift + right click on IE and select run as different user in the menu. A login bar window will show - Login and proceed. When you have logged in, the the browser will start and prompt you with a dialog. Choose the option you want and proceed (Hint, disable the security). The next time you start Internet Explorer as that user the dialog will not be shown and therefore Karma will be able to run its test suite.

If you run TeamCity as local system, it's a little bit trickier, as you have to download psexec from Microsoft and then execute the following command in powershell to start Internet Explorer:

psexec -sid "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"