Setting up Travis to work with PhantomJS is easy and fast however it makes more sense to run tests against a browser your users might be using. While PhantomJS gives a good approximation of a modern browser, some things might pass tests in PhantomJS but fail on Chrome.

In order to test in Google Chrome we need to take 3 steps:

1. Configure Travis to install Google Chrome

We need to configure .travis.yml to install it on the local testing machine:

Configure the machine machine to have sudo access and use the trusty beta builds:

sudo: required
dist: trusty

Use the before_install hook to perform the installation before the tests run:

before_install:
 - export CHROME_BIN=/usr/bin/google-chrome
 - export DISPLAY=:99.0
 - sh -e /etc/init.d/xvfb start
 - sudo apt-get update
 - sudo apt-get install -y libappindicator1 fonts-liberation
 - wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
 - sudo dpkg -i google-chrome*.deb

In short what this does is run a fake window manager so chrome thinks it isn't running on a headless machine, gets the latest package updates and installs Chrome and it's dependencies.

The complete config might look something like this:

sudo: required
dist: trusty
language: node_js
node_js:
 - "4.2"

before_install:
 - export CHROME_BIN=/usr/bin/google-chrome
 - export DISPLAY=:99.0
 - sh -e /etc/init.d/xvfb start
 - sudo apt-get update
 - sudo apt-get install -y libappindicator1 fonts-liberation
 - wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
 - sudo dpkg -i google-chrome*.deb

2. Configure Karma

Make the following changes to your karma.conf.js file:

• Add a custom launcher for running chrome with sandbox mode disabled.
• Change the browser target to our custom launcher when tests are running in Travis.

Include the following in your configuration object:

customLaunchers: {
  Chrome_travis_ci: {
    base: 'Chrome',
    flags: ['--no-sandbox']
  }
}

You can use the TRAVIS environment variable to check if the tests are running under Travis currently and change karma's browser target.

if(process.env.TRAVIS) {
  configuration.browsers = ['Chrome_travis_ci'];
}

3. Win!

That's it! now when Travis runs our tests it will first install Google Chrome and run the tests in Chrome.

Happy testing!