Harish Blogs

Recently, I had a task to migrate the WebDriver based test cases from PhantomJs to Chrome headless and the tests were running on headless CI docker containers. The migration was not a smooth journey as I had anticipated and this article is based on my learning experience during this migration. PhantomJs was widely used for headless testing and now it has been unofficially abandoned by the PhantomJs team. So we had to switch to some other browser which is under active development and also which supports headless mode. The choice was Google Chrome (or Chromium). As more and more organizations move towards cloud containers or virtual machines to run their CI build, it is quite important to have the ability to run your WebDriver based tests in headless mode. My key learnings from this migration: Avoid using Xvfb (Virtual Frame Buffer) as virtual display when your test suite has hundreds of test cases.  Xvfb crashes in the middle of the test for unknown reason and Chrome fail...

For Mac: Using homebrew: brew install --cask chromedriver chromedriver --version Using manual steps: Add the following lines to ~./bash_profile  or ~/.zprofile using vi or nano or any text editor # Installing Chrome Driver export CHROME_DRIVER_HOME=/downloaded_and_extracted_location/chrome_driver_2.33 export PATH=$CHROME_DRIVER_HOME:$PATH Verify the installation by executing the following command in Terminal chromedriver --version For Windows: Add c: \downloaded_and_extracted_location\chrome_driver_2.33\chromedriver to PATH environment variable (most probably through My Computer). Verify the installation by executing the following command in Command Prompt chromedriver --version For Ubuntu (Linux): sudo apt-get install chromium-browser sudo apt-get install chromium-chromedriver sudo ln -s /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromedriver /usr/local/bin/chromedriver chromium-browser --version chromedriver --version For Debian (Linux): s...