How to get Karma to work with Chrome

Question

I have a command-line-only Ubuntu 11.04 (GNU/Linux 2.6.35.4-rscloud x86_64) and I'm working through the Angular Phonecat tutorial which uses the Karma for testing. The Karma browser config page says Chrome launcher is "shipped with Karma by default."

But it's not working for me. This is the karma.conf.js. Below is the output.

 $ ./scripts/test.sh

Starting Karma Server (http://karma-runner.github.io)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
INFO [karma]: Karma v0.10.4 server started at http://localhost:9876/
INFO [launcher]: Starting browser Chrome
ERROR [launcher]: Cannot start Chrome
        Can not find the binary google-chrome
        Please set env variable CHROME_BIN

This answer points out that I need chromium.

So I tried to install Chrome on my Ubuntu with this guide with "download 64 bit version using command line". Everything went well until sudo apt-get -f install, which ended with a lot of "failed to fetch" from ubuntu IP addresses, such as 91.189.91.15 or 91.189.92.. Even with /usr/bin/googlesomething* that the "Can not find the binary google-chrome" goes away, I still got the "Cannot start Chrome" on the individual test level. Then while trying to fix errors, I deleted /usr/bin/googlesomething.

Currently, I have these node_modules:

angular-phonecat/node_modules$ ls
karma                      karma-html2js-preprocessor  karma-requirejs
karma-chrome-launcher      karma-jasmine               karma-script-launcher
karma-coffee-preprocessor  karma-junit-reporter
karma-firefox-launcher     karma-phantomjs-launcher

Q 1: Since my machine has only command-line access, no GUI, is the other Karma launcher, PhantomJS, a better choice than Chrome/Chromium?

Q 2: If I should still use Chrome/Chromium, should I get Chrome or Chromium?

Q 3: Does anyone know what exactly do I need to get google-chrome or chromium for Karma to work in the Angular app?

Answer 1

I'll expand on Ludwig's third point for answer seekers and for my own reference in the future...

The first thing you need to do is find where chromium-browser is installed. Run:

which chromium-browser 

This will return the path to the executable, which will look something like this:

/usr/bin/chromium-browser 

Then simply set the path:

export CHROME_BIN=/usr/bin/chromium-browser 

Now Karma can find the browser it needs to execute your tests (assuming you've decided to use a graphical interface).

Answer 2

1. If you only have a command-line interface, PhantomJS is the only choice for you.
2. In linux (at least 12.04 and forwards) chromium is the alternative. But you can't install it if you don't have a graphical ui.
3. The clue is here: "Please set env variable CHROME_BIN". Karma tries to execute a file called google-chrome and it does not exist. The name of the executable for chrome varies from OS to OS. Therefore you need to set an enviroment variable called CHROME_BIN which has the value of the name of your chrome executable. On my system (Linux desktop 13.10) this is chromium-browser.

Answer 3

My solution is to create an alias in linux to windws's chrome

alias launchchrome="\"/mnt/c/Program Files (x86)/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe\""

and after that export that alias as linux env variable

export CHROME_BIN=launchchrome

That's it, now if you run ng test your windows chrome will be used! In my particular case this solution worked