I had to make that joke ☝️
UPDATE: The initial goal of this post was to guide you through the configuration of the headless Chrome (Driver) on Jenkins. However, in the meantime this happened:
Chrome is faster and more stable than PhantomJS. And it doesn’t eat memory like crazy. — Vitaly Slobodin, Author of PhantomJS
Therefore I downgraded my soon-to-be-made-obsolete-by-Chrome-59 tutorial to a collection of the helpful links that I used as reference when I installed and configured my headless Chromium on the CI machine.
Xvfb (short for X virtual framebuffer) is an in-memory display server for UNIX-like operating system (e.g., Linux). It enables you to run graphical applications without a display (e.g., browser tests on a CI server) while also having the ability to take screenshots.
Helpful links
This awesome guide will tell you how to install and configure Xvfb.
This gist helped me install Chrome on Jenkins/Ubuntu. Here’s my final version:
# GIST SOURCE: https://gist.github.com/praphull27/6950d2a6c76a6e68acb7
######################################################################
echo "##### Add Google Chrome's repo to sources..."
echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
# Install Google's public key used for signing packages (e.g. Chrome)
wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add -
# Update apt sources
sudo apt-get update
echo "##### Installing Headless Chrome dependencies..."
sudo apt-get install -y libxpm4 libxrender1 libgtk2.0-0 libnss3 libgconf-2-4
sudo apt-get install -y google-chrome-stable
sudo apt-get install -y xvfb gtk2-engines-pixbuf
sudo apt-get install -y xfonts-cyrillic xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi xfonts-base xfonts-scalable
sudo apt-get install -y imagemagick x11-apps
## Since https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/ChromeDriver+plugin doesn't work...
echo "##### Downloading latest ChromeDriver..."
LATEST=$(wget -q -O - http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/LATEST_RELEASE)
sudo wget http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/$LATEST/chromedriver_linux64.zip
echo "##### Extracting and symlinking chromedriver to PATH so it's available globally"
sudo unzip chromedriver_linux64.zip && sudo ln -s $PWD/chromedriver /usr/local/bin/chromedriver
# echo "##### Starting X virtual framebuffer (Xvfb) in background..."
# xdpyinfo -display :99 >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo "Xvfb @99 is in use" || echo "Xvfb @99 is free"
# Xvfb -ac :99 -screen 0 1280x1024x16 &
# export DISPLAY=:99
# xdpyinfo -display :99 >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo "Xvfb @99 is in use" || echo "Xvfb @99 is free"
I also had to install the ChromeDriver Jenkins plugin.
This guide helps you configuring Jenkins for both Win/Nix machines.
And this short post on how to run Xvbf.
