gitdock/docs/internal/challenges.md

Development and design challenges

While working on GitDock, we want to document all major challenges and roadblocks that we encounter during the development of the app. This will help us and GitLab’s designers to directly see typical areas where users would struggle.

Tests and ChromeDriver in CI

When we initially set up end-to-end tests using electron’s spectron test framework, it was very hard to set up the tests to run in the pipeline (see @mvanremmerden’s efforts in !21). It turns out that ChromeDriver (the tool to use Chrome for automated browser tests) together with spectron required many dependencies and programs that were not installed in the standard Docker image node. That image is commonly used for JavaScript-based tests like ours (see the tests/ directory). We had to install additional programs, including Google Chrome and chromedriver:

feature-tests:
  # ... omitted job config ...
  script:
    # Download Google Chrome
    - wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
    # Install additional programs
    - apt-get update && DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -y install ./google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb xorg xvfb gtk2-engines-pixbuf dbus-x11 xfonts-cyrillic
    # Download chromedriver and make it executable
    - wget https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/2.41/chromedriver_linux64.zip
    - unzip chromedriver_linux64.zip
    - mv chromedriver /usr/bin/chromedriver
    - chown root:root /usr/bin/chromedriver
    - chmod +x /usr/bin/chromedriver
    # Start Xvfb (virtual X-Server, not required on your local machine)
    - Xvfb -ac :99 -screen 0 1280x1024x16 &
    # Set the display ID for chromedriver
    - export DISPLAY=:99
    - npm test

Installing these programs is a repetitive task that isn’t related to GitDock though. That is why we decided to use a custom Docker image (see the spectron-ci image).