1.4.0 does not seem to work with PhantomJS

[gweax]

I know, PhantomJS is not officially supported by Protractor, but since everything worked in 1.3.1 I decided to report this issue nonetheless. Feel free to close it as invalid (a short notice on the browser-setup page of the docs would be nice, though).

My protractor tests started to fail with 1.4.0 with this stacktrace:

Starting selenium standalone server...
Selenium standalone server started at http://172.31.195.6:53427/wd/hub
[launcher] Error: UnknownError: org.openqa.selenium.browserlaunchers.Proxies
    at new bot.Error (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/atoms/error.js:113:18)
    at Object.bot.response.checkResponse (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/atoms/response.js:106:9)
    at /Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/webdriver/webdriver.js:152:24
    at /Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/goog/base.js:1582:15
    at webdriver.promise.ControlFlow.runInNewFrame_ (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/webdriver/promise.js:1654:20)
    at notify (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/webdriver/promise.js:465:12)
    at notifyAll (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/webdriver/promise.js:442:7)
    at resolve (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/webdriver/promise.js:420:7)
    at fulfill (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/webdriver/promise.js:535:5)
    at /Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/goog/base.js:1582:15
==== async task ====
WebDriver.createSession()
    at Function.webdriver.WebDriver.acquireSession_ (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/webdriver/webdriver.js:149:22)
    at Function.webdriver.WebDriver.createSession (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/webdriver/webdriver.js:123:30)
    at Builder.build (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/selenium-webdriver/builder.js:294:22)
    at LocalDriverProvider.getDriver (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/lib/driverProviders/local.js:121:9)
    at /Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/lib/runner.js:222:41
    at _fulfilled (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/q/q.js:797:54)
    at self.promiseDispatch.done (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/q/q.js:826:30)
    at Promise.promise.promiseDispatch (/Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/q/q.js:759:13)
    at /Users/matthias/workspace/my-app/node_modules/grunt-protractor-runner/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/q/q.js:573:44

I use grunt-protractor-runner, as you can see. My e2e.conf.js looks like that:

exports.config = {
    "capabilities": {
        "browserName": "phantomjs",
        "phantomjs.binary.path": require("phantomjs").path,
        "phantomjs.ghostdriver.cli.args": ["--loglevel=DEBUG"]
    },
    "specs": [
        "e2e/**/*.js"
    ]
};

When using Chrome as a Browser, everything works fine.

[juliemr]

Thanks, I'm happy to label this issue and leave it open. If anyone wants to look in to Phantom issues I'd be happy to take a look at PRs.

[ReactiveRaven]

Downgrading to 1.3.1 fixes this issue for me too, thanks for the heads up @gweax .

This is down to a deprecated method in Selenium being removed. The selenium driver for phantomjs, ghostdriver, was relying on this method. This was reported to ghostdriver, and subsequently a pull request was merged, but has not yet been released.

We will need to wait for ghostdriver to release, then phantomjs to push a release including it, then finally for the npm phantomjs wrapper to release before we can use protractor 1.4 with phantomjs again.

[juliemr]

@ReactiveRaven Thank you for looking into this and the thorough response!

[typekpb]

+1
can't wait to see all this happen

[chino23]

+1
this is quite critical for me as well :)

[marko-ciric]

+1

[sullenboom]

+1

[sallojusuresh]

+1
Waiting for 1.4.0 support for PhantomJs

[citypaul]

+1 yes please...

[hankduan]

If the issue is with PhantomJS trying to use a deprecated selenium method as @ReactiveRaven pointed out, you should be able to get protractor 1.4/1.5 working with Phantom by downgrading the selenium version (https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/master/config.json). We're not going to downgrade it in master, but you should be able to downgrade it locally and see if it's working with that change.

[laurelnaiad]

Yup, I'd been planning to try that and just finally gave it a shot.

I'm running this as a postinstall script for my npm package to force protractor down to 2.43.1 of selenium server standalone:

var pconfig = require('protractor/config.json');

pconfig.webdriverVersions.selenium = '2.43.1';

require('fs').writeFile(
  'node_modules/protractor/config.json', JSON.stringify(pconfig)
);

and PhantomJS works again (w/protractor 1.5.0). I'm going to cross my fingers and hope other things don't break before this hack can be removed. :)