How to run Angular6 E2E tests on Alpine Linux

Question

While trying to run E2E tests using Alpine Linux we have the following mysterious error:

E/launcher - spawn (...)/selenium/chromedriver_2.40 ENOENT

How to reproduce

docker run -it --name my-alpine --rm alpine:latest /bin/ash
apk add --update nodejs nodejs-npm chromium \
    && export CHROME_BIN=/usr/bin/chromium-browser

npm install -g @angular/cli
ng new testAlpine
cd testAlpine
ng e2e

The results

[14:10:54] I/file_manager - creating folder /testAlpine/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium
ℹ ｢wdm｣: Compiled successfully.
[14:10:54] I/update - chromedriver: unzipping chromedriver_2.40.zip
[14:10:55] I/update - chromedriver: setting permissions to 0755 for /testAlpine/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver_2.40
(node:121) [DEP0022] DeprecationWarning: os.tmpDir() is deprecated. Use os.tmpdir() instead.
[14:10:55] I/launcher - Running 1 instances of WebDriver
[14:10:55] I/direct - Using ChromeDriver directly...
[14:10:55] E/launcher - spawn /testAlpine/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver_2.40 ENOENT
[14:10:55] E/launcher - Error: spawn /testAlpine/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver_2.40 ENOENT
    at _errnoException (util.js:1024:11)
    at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (internal/child_process.js:190:19)
    at onErrorNT (internal/child_process.js:372:16)
    at _combinedTickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:138:11)
    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:180:9)
[14:10:55] E/launcher - Process exited with error code 199
An unexpected error occured: undefined

Some investigation details

Assuming that protractor uses Nodejs spawn function, we tried to run the command from ash, and the result was a "not found" message! digging a little bit about it found that this could be related to a missing dynamic linked library.

In order to validate the assumption, we installed binutils to check for the dynamic link dependency.

apk add --update binutils
readelf -l /testAlpine/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver_2.40

And the results show the dependency that is not present in Alpine Linux,

/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2

Elf file type is EXEC (Executable file)
Entry point 0x490000
There are 11 program headers, starting at offset 64

Program Headers:
  Type           Offset             VirtAddr           PhysAddr
                 FileSiz            MemSiz              Flags  Align
  PHDR           0x0000000000000040 0x0000000000200040 0x0000000000200040
                 0x0000000000000268 0x0000000000000268  R      0x8
  INTERP         0x00000000000002a8 0x00000000002002a8 0x00000000002002a8
                 0x000000000000001c 0x000000000000001c  R      0x1
      [Requesting program interpreter: /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2]
  LOAD           0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000200000 0x0000000000200000
                 0x000000000028f27c 0x000000000028f27c  R      0x1000
  LOAD           0x0000000000290000 0x0000000000490000 0x0000000000490000

Trying to get an updated chrome driver version using webdriver-manager didn't work as well. the downloaded version has the same issue.

npm install -g webdriver-manager

webdriver-manager update
webdriver-manager: using global installed version 12.0.6
[14:30:20] I/file_manager - creating folder /usr/lib/node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium
[14:30:21] I/update - chromedriver: unzipping chromedriver_2.40.zip
[14:30:21] I/update - chromedriver: setting permissions to 0755 for /usr/lib/node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver_2.40

/testAlpine # /usr/lib/node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver_2.40
/bin/ash: /usr/lib/node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver_2.40: not found

Random toughts

• As Alpine Linux moved to musl libc is it necessary to rebuild chromeDriver to use it?

Answer 1

It is necessary to rebuild chromedriver with musl libc or to use the chromedriver package from alpine repos, you can install it with apk add --no-cache chromium-chromedriver.

You also need to tell protractor to use the correct binary with chromeDriver: '/usr/bin/chromedriver' in your protractor config.

Answer 2

For people that have this issue in the future, I was totally unable to get the combination of alpine + angular + protractor + webdriver-manager to co-operate in any out-of-the-box supported way.

After much tinkering around, I managed to get it to work by

1. using webdriver-manager to generate configs
2. overriding the webdriver-manager driver with one from the alpine registry

Dockerfile:

FROM node:12-alpine

RUN \
  echo "http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community" >> /etc/apk/repositories \
  && echo "http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main" >> /etc/apk/repositories \
  && echo "http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing" >> /etc/apk/repositories \
  && apk --no-cache update \
  && apk --no-cache upgrade \
  && apk add --no-cache --virtual .build-deps chromium chromium-chromedriver \
  && rm -rf /var/cache/apk/* /tmp/*

ENV CHROME_BIN /usr/bin/chromium-browser

protractor.conf.js

capabilities: {
    browserName: 'chrome',
    chromeOptions: {
        args: ['--headless', '--disable-gpu', '--no-sandbox'],
    },
},
directConnect: true,

The script looks somewhat like this:

  before_script:
    - yarn install --frozen-lockfile --cache-folder "$CI_PROJECT_DIR/.yarn"
  script:
    - npx webdriver-manager update --versions.chrome="$(chromium-browser --version | cut -d ' ' -f 2)"
    - mv "$CI_PROJECT_DIR/node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver_$(chromium-browser --version | cut -d ' ' -f 2)" "$CI_PROJECT_DIR/node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver.bak"
    - ln -s "/usr/bin/chromedriver" "$CI_PROJECT_DIR/node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver_$(chromium-browser --version | cut -d ' ' -f 2)"
    - yarn run e2e --webdriverUpdate=false

Note that the code mentioned above is code for a Gitlab CI configuration: based on your needs you will probably have to:

• Convert it into a script usable for your environment
• Remove/replace some environment variables