Novitsh / gitlab-ci-chrome-headless

GitLab CI - Chrome headless

This project allows you to work with GitLab CI and use a container that can both git push to an origin and allow you to run a headless chrome.

Although it can be used with different CI tools, it was originally created and tested with GitLab CI only.

Build is tested with: Google Chrome 65.0.3325.146

This is useful when you have another external git repository hosting your codebase of your application and at the same time you are in need of headless browser capabilities for purposes such as Behat testing from that remote server.

Example implementation .gitlab-ci.yml file:

image: novitsh/gitlab-ci-chrome-headless

stages:
  - develop

before_script:
  - echo "Establishing SSH tunnel in the background."
  - ssh -R 9222:localhost:9222 $USER@$REMOTE -fN

deployment to develop:
  stage: develop
  script:
    - echo "Now pushing new code to remote git repository."
    - git-push $USER@$REMOTE:$PROJECT.git develop
    - ssh $USER@$REMOTE "cd /project/behat && bin/behat --config behat.yml"

Breakdown

Above example code will basically open an SSH tunnel, push the Gitlab repo to a remote server, and then connect to it to run some Behat tests.

Please note that $USER, $REMOTE and $PROJECT are variables you need to set in the CI/CD environment variables section. So just don't copy paste this example :-)

SSH Tunnel

A tunnel is needed for behat (which is running on a remote server) to access Chrome (which is running in this container).

The -R flag specifies that connections to the given TCP port or Unix socket on the remote (server) host are to be forwarded to the local side. Read all info on man ssh for the -R flag.

Running the container locally

You can run this container locally with Docker. You will however need to specify the --cap-add=SYS_ADMIN or --privileged flag in order to run Chrome (this is due to how Chrome works).

Please note

A known issue in Gitlab requires you to invoke the startup script manually. You can do so by adding

- xvfb-run -e /dev/stdout --server-args='-screen 0, 1024x768x16' google-chrome-stable --headless --disable-gpu --remote-debugging-address=0.0.0.0 --remote-debugging-port=9222 &

to the before_script section in your gitlab_ci.yml file.