Work-around to use Protractor@5.4.2 with Chrome 74+

[luker2]

@cnishina Does a work-around exist? Or maybe the possibility of a minor protractor 5 release with latest webdriver fixes/updates?

Reason: It's a huge effort to migrate large protractor projects to version 6.0.0. When chrome auto-updates, you are SOL.

Explanation of problem
Protractor Error

[cnishina]

There is a fix that is currently tied to webdriver-manager 13.

Good news is that when these changes were happening, I was working on fixing webdriver-manager. You could use Protractor 5.4.2 with webdriver-manager 13. angular/webdriver-manager#372 however I'm not sure how this works with direct connect and local if there are more than one version of webdriver-manager in the node modules directory.

Could we release webdriver-manager 13 with Protractor 5? Possibly but it might be considered as a breaking change since I removed mobile support for webdriver-manager in version 13.

[cnishina]

Setting discussion tag for Protractor 5 + webdriver-manager 13 release.

[luker2]

I'm actually surprised this hasn't stirred up more conversation. I could be wrong, but I'd think other companies on 5.4.2 would be hit by this and also feel the urgency to find a work-around instead of upgrade to 6.0.0.

Can anyone guess the effort needed to create another 5.x.x release?

@cnishina Before your reply I tried hacking around to get the latest webdriver-manager to work with 5.4.2 with no luck. I simply:

1. npm installed 13
2. ran webdriver-manager update to download chromedriver 74
3. copied the selenium folder
   • from node_modules\webdriver-manager\selenium
   • to node_modules\protractor\node_modules\webdriver-manager\selenium

[cnishina]

Yup. I was looking at the master branch when looking at the driver providers and not 5.4.2. So there's more work to be done to get 13 to work. Let me go update my PR. I might have to create a beta release for webdriver-manager to experiment with this.

[cnishina]

Okay angular/webdriver-manager#372 is my workaround for 13 with Protractor 5.4.2 (with tests!).

[luker2]

Well I'm at a loss now. All the sudden today I no longer receive yesterday's error, and tests run fine on chrome 74 & chromedriver 2.46

So before, tests were running fine on 73, I purposely updated to 74, then received the above error. So I just assumed it was related, and that anyone who upgraded chrome to 74 would no longer be able to run tests unless they spun up a selenium grid hub/node locally.

According to docs, Chromedriver 2.46 doesn't support chrome 74, but it at least allows me to run tests now? Any idea what else could've changed? Or if that error was even related?

Chrome 74.0.3729.108
Protractor 5.4.2
webdriver-manager 12.1.2
chromedriver_2.46

[luker2]

Nevermind, I just saw your SO post and, looking at our previous build logs, it looks like webdriver:manager update was downloading

selenium-server-standalone-4.0.0-alpha-1.zip.jar
instead of
selenium-server-standalone-3.141.59.jar

[cnishina]

So now this is an actual issue. Chrome 74 came out and Protractor 5.4.2 uses webdriver-manager 12.x.x. This only downloads 2.xx chromedrivers. This is a problem and we'll have a hot fix out for this soon.

[cnishina]

Related angular/webdriver-manager#376

[cnishina]

So here's the fix for webdriver-manager 12 which will work with Protractor 5.4.2: angular/webdriver-manager#377