What is a good headless browser to run with protractor?

Question

New User here.

After hours of building my smoke and regression tests, I found out after reading many cases online that phantomjs is known to be a trouble to run with

Answer 1

If anyone reached here - the answers are outdated. Chromium (on next release) now supports headless mode. no need to work hard.

You can read more here:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome

Here is an example from command line

chrome \
 --headless \                   # Runs Chrome in headless mode.
 --disable-gpu \                # Temporarily needed for now.
 --remote-debugging-port=9222 \
 https://www.chromestatus.com   # URL to open. Defaults to about:blank.

And you can simply trigger protractor with capabilities for chrome:

Activating chrome language flags when activating from protractor (selenium)

Here is the configuraiton I am using

 capabilities: {
    'browserName': browserName,
    chromeOptions: {
      binary: '/Users/guymograbi/Downloads/chrome-mac/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium',
      args: ['--headless','--disable-gpu']
    }
  },

Update - new versions of chrome doesn't require binary property

In my environments I found I can remove the binary property as new version of chrome is available on stable branches

My protractor configuration is

capabilities: {
    'browserName': 'chrome',
    chromeOptions: {
      args: [ '--headless', '--disable-gpu', '--no-sandbox', '--window-size=1920x1200' ]
    },

  },

And it works smoothly for weeks now. highly recommended.

Update - how to do this in karma is super easy

Using headless chrome in karma is super easy:

 browsers: 'ChromeHeadless'

it should work with the chrome loader and everything. more info