How can I run Chrome headless from protractor WITHOUT using a Selenium server

Question

I have Chrome working headless via a Selenium server by running xvfb bound to DISPLAY:10 and then running Selenium with a DISPLAY=:10 webdriver-manager start. So that's all fine.

I also have Chromedriver running directly from protractor by specifying directConnect: true in my protractor.conf.

What I'd like to do is a combination of the two, ie. run chromedriver directly (NO SELENIUM!), but somehow instruct it to run headless on DISPLAY :10.

In terms of topology, everything is run on the developer's PC. There are no servers involved. In a comment below, I mention a node server: this is being used to launch protractor instead of the more usual launching from the command line. I want protractor to be running on DISPLAY:0 so I can see its output, test failures etc. When it spawns chrome using chromedriver, I want chrome to be running on DISPLAY:10. My reason for doing this is that I want the chrome window to be bigger than my physical screen. See How can I screenshot the full height of a mobile form factor? for background.

Answer 1

I'm guessing the topology is like this:

• Box A: xvfb, DISPLAY=:10, Selenium Server, chromedriver
• Box B: DISPLAY=:0, node, protractor (directConnect: true), chromedriver
• Box C: test runner.

I don't know how else it could be laid out, given that DISPLAY is an environment variable, not a parameter to be passed.

In which case, assuming you don't want a separate xvfb installed on Box B, and A is reachable (plus a decent connection) from B, the solution is simply to set:

DISPLAY=boxAHost:10

on Box B.

If A isn't reachable from B, it might be simplest to just duplicate the xvfb setup on both A and B, and have DISPLAY=:10 on both.

Answer 2

I had a "Doh!!!" moment of zen and the whole thing is much easier that I thought it would be.

I had conflated the stdout of node/protractor (which I want on my screen) with the X display of chrome (which I want headless on DISPLAY:10). Of course they are totally different!!!!

Simply prefixing protractor with DISPLAY=:10 eg.

DISPLAY=:10 protractor /installation_test/conf-c-direct-noserver.js

or, in my case since I'm running a node server which in turn spawns protractor, ...

DISPLAY=:10 npm start

So protractor runs in my terminal and I can watch stdout, whereas the DISPLAY=:10 is inherited down through the call layers and is eventually seen and understood by Chrome.