Using Protractor with PhantomJS

Question

I need to E2E test my AngularJS Application an Protractor seems like the right way to do it. Setup was fairly straightforward and it works like a charm in Chrome. I need however use headless browser and been researching on how to use Protractor with PhantomJS and I found this:

Note: We recommend against using PhantomJS for tests with Protractor. There are many reported issues with PhantomJS crashing and behaving differently from real browsers.

Above is from https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/master/docs/browser-setup.md

So my questions are:

1. Is this still the case and Proractor still having issues with PhantomJS?

2. If so how bad is it and is there any better option?

3. How would I do E2E testing when my app is being deployed to server?

Answer 1

Is this still the case and Protractor still having issues with PhantomJS?

This is very true.

If so how bad is it and is there any better option?

It's difficult to answer how bad is it, but there are multiple issues about hanging phantomjs, dying phantomjs, performing slow phantomjs e.g.:

• PhantomJS sometimes crashes (open issue for more than a year)

According to the question, the main reason for you to use protractor is end-to-end testing. You should try to imitate real-world use cases, imitate a real user working in your application. What browser would a real user use? PhantomJS? The answer is probably "no". Use the browsers which your application is designed to work in, and the browsers your real users use.

How would I do E2E testing when my app is being deployed to server?

The most "natural" approach is to use a remote selenium server that provides different capabilities - browsers and platforms. You can start up and configure your own selenium server, or you can use BrowserStack or Sauce Labs which are doing a great job providing you a way to test your application among a wide variety of different browsers and systems.

You can also run protractor in a headless "environment" with no real, but virtual display (xvfb), see more here.

Answer 2

You may use chrome itself in headless mode in 59 version onwards without any external tools.

capabilities: { 
   browserName: 'chrome', 
   chromeOptions: 
  { 
   args: [ "--headless", "--window size=800,600" ] 
  } 
}