How to add the chrome binary to run e.g. Karma tests on headless chrome on a CI server

Question

I like to run my karma unit tests on a headless chrome. Using karma-chrome-launcher and setting the browser to "ChromeHeadless" works on my machine. But on the CI server it fails with the message "No binary for ChromeHeadless browser on your platform." Installing chrome on the CI machine is not possible. Is there another way to load the chrome binaries? for example the google puppeteer module seems to load that when run. from the docs: "Puppeteer downloads and uses a specific version of Chromium". How can i achieve the same?

Answer 1

You can use Puppeteer (headless Chromium), follow these instructions.

Answer 2

If what you fear is that download from the internet might be slow, you can tell puppeteer where to download chrome from and use a local address.

Use PUPPETEER_DOWNLOAD_HOST to specify where to download Chrome from and PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD to skip downloading Chrome altogether.

You can read more about this in the documentation.