E2E testing with headless Chrome and Nightwatch

Setting up End-to-End testing (for Nyssetutka.fi) using Nightwatch.js, Selenium and ChromeDriver and running the tests in a headless Chrome instance was super easy.

Update 12/2017: since many people are arriving here from Google, please do share any and all ideas you have if you think this post could be improved somehow. Thanks!

Since I didn’t find any information whether this could actually work already (is the headless flag still buggy or something, has ChromeDriver added support etc.), here are my findings. All I had to configure was to add a CLI arg for Chrome to my Nightwatch configuration. Useful parts below.

selenium: {
  start_process: true,
  server_path: require('selenium-server').path,
  host: '127.0.0.1',
  port: 4444,
  cli_args: {
    'webdriver.chrome.driver': require('chromedriver').path,
  },
},
chrome: {
  desiredCapabilities: {
    browserName: 'chrome',
    javascriptEnabled: true,
    acceptSslCerts: true,
    chromeOptions: {
      args: [ 'headless' ]
    }
  }
}

Version information:

./node_modules/.bin/nightwatch -v
nightwatch v0.9.16

./node_modules/.bin/chromedriver -v
ChromeDriver 2.30.477691 (6ee44a7247c639c0703f291d320bdf05c1531b57)

google-chrome –version
Google Chrome 59.0.3071.115

I’m running Ubuntu 17.04.