Vagrant and Chef are here used to launch and provision an Ubuntu 12.04 virtual machine for the purpose of running headless browser end to end tests against AngularJS web applications using Protractor, a test tool that works with the established Selenium and WebDriver ecosystem framework.
The following items are installed on the VM:
- Protractor
- Selenium Standalone Server
- Xvfb
- Chromium
- Firefox
- PhantomJS
Download the latest Vagrant installer for your platform from http://downloads.vagrantup.com. Don't use the Vagrant version in the default package repositories because it is far too old.
To obtain a suitably recent version of Virtualbox, just follow the instructions at the Virtualbox website. You can either download a package, or set up your package management system to use the latest branches:
For example, for Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian trusty contrib
Then run:
wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.3
The vagrant-omnibus plugin installs or updates the version of Chef in the Vagrant VM:
vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus
Librarian-chef is a tool for managing your cookbooks, and will fetch them based on the contents of the Cheffile in the project directory. To install on Ubuntu 14.04 you will have to first update to Ruby 2.*, such by using RVM, and then:
sudo gem install chef librarian-chef
Adjust as appropriate for other distributions.
To use this VM to test an AngularJS applications with Protractor first alter the Vagrantfile to create synced folders that include the relevant Protractor configuration files. E.g.:
config.vm.synced_folder "/my-workspace/project", "/project"
config.vm.synced_folder "/my-workspace", "/workspace"
A running instance of the AngularJS application is also needed, but this can be on another VM or remote server. Since Protractor uses Selenium, the tested application can be anywhere so long as its web server is accessible from the Protractor VM.
Once the above pieces are in place:
cd /path/to/protractor-selenium-server-vagrant
librarian-chef install
vagrant up
This will launch and provision your virtual machine. Note that installing the Oracle JDK can take a while. Once done you can set up and run Protractor tests in the server, using configuration scripts from your synced project directories.
A trivial test Express server, Jasmine test cases, and Protractor configuration
are included under the test directory in this repository. To verify that the
Vagrant VM setup is correct and functional, log in via SSH:
cd /path/to/protractor-selenium-server-vagrant
vagrant ssh
Then install Express globally and run the Protractor tests for various browsers. All should pass:
sudo npm install -g express
cd /vagrant/test
protractor protractor.conf.chromium.js
protractor protractor.conf.firefox.js
protractor protractor.conf.phantomjs.js
The test Protractor configuration files launch the Express server before tests run and then shut it down afterwards. This is neither a common nor recommended approach to end to end testing, but it is helpful here.
Bringing up a new server is a lengthy provisioning process. Many packages are required to install Chromium and Firefox on a headless server, and this can take quite the long time. This is not well suited to creating servers on demand: you are better off provisioning once, creating an image, and then instantiating new VMs from that image.
Ubuntu 12.04 is presently used as the VM OS because as of Q2 2014 there is a blocking issue in the interaction between the libGL library and Chromium that prevents the use of Chromium headless with Xvfb in Ubuntu 14.04. This issue is not present in Ubuntu 12.04.