Starting Meteor with Velocity test without the Chrome pop-up

Question

In my quest to gather knowledge about how to use Velocity, I ran across a snippet that mentioned a shell variable to set the browser Velocity used to run Karma in PhantomJS as apposed to creating a Chrome window pop-up each time I run my app in DEV-mode. At the time I shrugged it off, but after having implemented some testing in two of my apps, I can say it's an annoying pain to have the tests running in a pop-up window.

Does someone know if how one might get the tests running such that they run in PhantomJS and not in a Chrome pop-up windows? I thought the variable was something like VELOCITY_BROWSER=PhantomJS, but that doesn't seem to work. Also, is there a way to setup Meteor so that it simply sets this as a default so I don't have to create the variable each time, like in a config or something?

Answer 1

I found the answer for those that find this and were also wondering how to prevent the Karma popup.

I am using the sanjo:jasmine test suite, which uses Karma for the client integration tests. You can set the default browser to PhantomJS by simply adding this to your environment when you run meteor:

JASMINE_BROWSER=PhantomJS

Or, if you just want to turn off client integration tests altogether simply adding this:

JASMINE_CLIENT_UNIT=0

So, for instance you can run your app like JASMINE_BROWSER=PhantomJS meteor, and you will not get the popup any longer. What I did was created a meteor.sh in my app root folder that I use to launch with environment variables like so:

#!/bin/sh
JASMINE_BROWSER=PhantomJS meteor

This is only for convenience so I wouldn't have to remember the variable to do this. This should work on any *nix-based OS. You could also make an alias if you wanted. It would look something like:

alias meteor=JASMINE_BROWSER=PhantomJS meteor

I may be slightly off in the syntax, but I think that should work.

To use PhantomJS you do need to have it installed, so run this in a terminal:

npm install -g phantomjs

Or, if you are on a Mac run (you will need brew installed):

brew install phantomjs

Hope this helps someone in the future.