karma-chrome-launcher

Launcher for Google Chrome, Google Chrome Canary and Google Chromium.

Installation

The easiest way is to keep karma-chrome-launcher as a devDependency in your package.json, by running

$ npm i -D karma-chrome-launcher

Configuration

// karma.conf.js
module.exports = function(config) {
  config.set({
    browsers: ['Chrome', 'Chrome_without_security'], // You may use 'ChromeCanary', 'Chromium' or any other supported browser

    // you can define custom flags
    customLaunchers: {
      Chrome_without_security: {
        base: 'Chrome',
        flags: ['--disable-web-security', '--disable-site-isolation-trials']
      }
    }
  })
}

The --user-data-dir is set to a temporary directory but can be overridden on a custom launcher as shown below. One reason to do this is to have a permanent Chrome user data directory inside the project directory to be able to install plugins there (e.g. JetBrains IDE Support plugin).

customLaunchers: {
  Chrome_with_debugging: {
    base: 'Chrome',
    chromeDataDir: path.resolve(__dirname, '.chrome')
  }
}

You can pass list of browsers as a CLI argument too:

$ karma start --browsers Chrome,Chrome_without_security

Headless Chromium with Puppeteer

The Chrome DevTools team created Puppeteer - it will automatically install Chromium for all platforms and contains everything you need to run it from within your CI.

Available Browsers

Note: Headless mode requires a browser version >= 59

• Chrome (CHROME_BIN)
• ChromeHeadless (CHROME_BIN)
• Chromium (CHROMIUM_BIN)
• ChromiumHeadless (CHROMIUM_BIN)
• ChromeCanary (CHROME_CANARY_BIN)
• ChromeCanaryHeadless (CHROME_CANARY_BIN)
• Dartium (DARTIUM_BIN)

Usage

$ npm i -D puppeteer karma-chrome-launcher

// karma.conf.js
process.env.CHROME_BIN = require('puppeteer').executablePath()

module.exports = function(config) {
  config.set({
    browsers: ['ChromeHeadless']
  })
}

For more information on Karma see the homepage.