setting environment parameter for protractor e2e tests

Question

We are using protractor to test our front end angular app that we are building.

Currently we are using browser.get() to specify our environement we wish to test again(localhost:9000, staging, UAT) however I am wanting to parameterize this so that when we run our tests using grunt test:e2e we can specify a parameter to change the browser.get() to a specified environment.

Something like being able to call grunt test:e2e NODE_ENV=uat to test against specified environment.

Anyone have any insight to how to do this?

Noonan

Answer 1

You can pass any number of arguments to protractor You need to pass parameters within the protractor task in your grunt file. Here is small snippet

config: grunt.file.readJSON('config-param.json'),
protractor: {
        options: {
            configFile: "config/e2e.conf.js", // Default config file
            keepAlive: true, // If false, the grunt process stops when the test fails. 
            noColor: false, // If true, protractor will not use colors in its output.
            debug: '<%= config.debugger %>',
            args: {
                params: '<%= config %>'
            }
        },
        run: {}
    },

and you can access parameters in your specs like. browser.params.fieldName

Littman

I see that i can put baseUrl: into the params field of the grunt file, however can i have a task runner that specifies the baseUrl to use? Even being able to call browser.params.baseUrl in my specs, this wont help with being able to run tests specific to my environment. – Noonan

Answer 2

The common way to approach the problem is to use baseUrl command-line argument:

protractor --baseUrl='http://localhost:9000' protractor.conf.js

Or, you can set the webdriver.base.url environment variable:

webdriver.base.url=http://localhost:9000

You can also use a task manager (e.g. grunt and grunt-protractor-runner) and configure different tasks for running tests in a different environment setting different baseUrls.

Monosymmetric

Thanks for that! I've figured out that I can set the grunt task manager to have something like: else if (target === 'e2euat') { return grunt.task.run([ 'clean:server', 'env:all', 'env:uat', 'concurrent:test', 'injector', 'wiredep', 'autoprefixer', 'express:dev', 'protractor' ]); } However the problem i'm not trying to solve is how to pass in this task to the browser.get() in my spec file for when navigating "home" – Noonan

@Noonan whenever you are using browser.get(), use relative to base urls, e.g. browser.get("index.html"). – Monosymmetric

Thanks! So i think grunt-protractor-runner is the route i should be taking. Fortunately, i noticed that our Gruntfile.js is already referencing protractor where we specify the protractor.config.js file. If i specify the baseUrl: "http://localhost:9000" in protractor.config.js then we are always going to be navigate to localhost rather than a parameterized environment. Is there a way to get the task manager to update the different baseUrl's? I dont see anything in the docs that i've read through:\ Maybe a way to say baseUATUrl:? – Noonan

Hi, can anyone guide on how to set baseUrl using gulp task – Cetinje