Protractor Test cases execution fails when try to run on Headless Chrome V71

Question

I'm using protractor for my e2e tests. Recently we updated to Chrome 71 and Webdriver 2.45 and now we constantly get the error: "chrome not reachable" when running headless.

If we do not run headless our tests pass. Because headless tests are more consistent en faster I still want to use headless mode.

On chrome 70 and webdriver 2.44 we had no problems at all.

        args: [
            '--disable-gpu',
            '--disable-impl-side-painting',
            '--disable-gpu-sandbox',
            '--disable-accelerated-2d-canvas',
            '--disable-accelerated-jpeg-decoding',
            '--disable-popup-blocking',
            '--no-sandbox',
            '--test-type=ui',
            '--start-maximized',
            '--window-size=1800,1000',
            '--headless'
        ]

WebDriverError: chrome not reachable (Session info: headless chrome=71.0.3578.80) (Driver info: chromedriver=2.45.615355 (d5698f682d8b2742017df6c81e0bd8e6a3063189),platform=Mac OS X 10.14.1 x86_64)

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

The cause in our case is most likely to be this bug in either ChromeDriver or Chrome headless:

• Unable to download a file when using in headless mode (selenium, chromedriver)

Some of our tests trigger file downloads, and it appears that ChromeDriver or Chrome headless freezes from that point onward, responding to any further requests with "chrome not reachable".