Run behat chrome headless (without selenium?) - google-chrome

Question

I ran Behat test on PhantomJS without issue. I was starting it with this:
bin/phantomjs --webdriver=8643
It works, but I want to run a Chrome headless instead of PhantomJS. To do that I tried this:
google-chrome --headless --remote-debugging-port=8643
But Behat doesn't seem to start anything on this Chrome. I found a lot of docs for Chrome with Selenium but I wanted to know if it's possible to run it like I was running PhantomJS with the Selenium driver, but without Selenium server?
default:
suites:
default:
contexts:
- FeatureContext
- Behat\MinkExtension\Context\MinkContext
extensions:
Behat\MinkExtension:
base_url: 'http://myurl.com/'
sessions:
default:
selenium2:
wd_host: 'http://localhost:8643'

Answer 1

To run your tests on Google Chrome, you will need chromedriver
Then you can use the port chromedriver is listening to (9515 by default) instead of PhantomJs 8643. You don't need Selenium anymore then.
Finally, you pass the --headless flag to chrome so you don't need xfvb.
A config example:
# behat.yml
default:
extensions:
# ...
Behat\MinkExtension:
base_url: 'http://myurl.com/'
sessions:
default:
selenium2:
browser: chrome
# Note: I'm not totally sure you still need the /wd/hub path
wd_host: http://localhost:9515/wd/hub
capabilities:
chrome:
switches:
- "--headless"
More documentation: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome

Answer 2

This worked for me on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Installed latest version of chromedriver via https://medium.com/caendra-tech/acceptance-tests-with-behat-and-chrome-headless-2824aaa31fd7
Start chromedriver in the background on default port chromedriver &
Update behat.yml to
default:
extensions:
Behat\MinkExtension:
sessions:
default_session:
selenium2:
browser: chrome
wd_host: http://127.0.0.1:9515
capabilities:
chrome:
switches:
- "--headless"
- "--disable-gpu"