Chrome crashing when launched by Karma executed from MSBuild - google-chrome

Question

My build server service is executing the following command from an msbuild file:
Exec Command="karma start $(LandscapeExplorerProjectFolder)karma.conf.js -- log-level debug
This then launches a Karma instance running on Node.js
Karma is configured to launch Chrome to run my Jasmine tests. When I execute the above command manually by logging on to the server and typing into the command prompt, the tests run as I would expect.
However when Karma is started by my build service, Chrome is initially launched but then crashes.
From the output of the console when running a build I get the following:
WARN [launcher]: [39mChrome have not captured in 60000 ms, killing.
DEBUG [launcher]: [39mProcess Chrome exited with code 0
When looking in the Chrome log I see:
[6888:2988:1105/162913:ERROR:child_process_launcher.cc(444)] Failed to launch child process
[6888:2988:1105/162913:WARNING:sad_tab_view.cc(105)] Tab Killed: http://localhost:9876/
The exact same console command works fine when executed manually, but there is something about the way the build service is executing things that is causing Chrome to crash. Does anyone have any ideas about this?

Answer 1

I've seen this issue before.
I was not able to resolve it, but was able to workaround it.
This seems to be related to running Jenkins as SYSTEM account on Windows - if this is the case, try changing the service to run as a service account.
I worked around this with PSexec - you can download the tool at:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx
And then use it in the job to exec Karma:
C:\Path\to\pexec.exe -s -i -accepteula karma start $(LandscapeExplorerProjectFolder)karma.conf.js -- log-level debug
Again this seems to be related to spawning child processes with SYSTEM.