Protractor: Auto starting selenium server does not work with VPN

[jlin412]

If we remove seleniumAddress in conf file, it should automatically start selenium server.
However, I have been noticing that it doesn't work with vpn. It stuck at starting server and it eventually time out. Does anyone experience the same?

[NickTomlin]

Hi there!

Your question is better suited for StackOverflow or Gitter. Please ask a question there with the 'protractor' tag or post in the Gitter Channel to get help.

From the the getting help section of the README:

Please ask usage and debugging questions on StackOverflow (use the "protractor" tag) or in the Angular discussion group. (Please do not ask support questions here on Github.)

[jlin412]

I don't think so. It just start failing after introducing automatic
selenium server start. I believe that it is a valid bug.

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 9:56 AM, Nick Tomlin [email protected]
wrote:

Hi there!

Your question is better suited for StackOverflow or Gitter. Please ask a
question there with the 'protractor' tag
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask?tags=protractor or post in the Gitter
Channel https://gitter.im/angular/protractor to get help.

From the the getting help
https://github.com/angular/protractor#getting-help section of the
README:

Please ask usage and debugging questions on StackOverflow (use the
"protractor" tag) or in the Angular discussion group. (Please do not ask
support questions here on Github.)

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
https://github.com/angular/protractor/issues/2613#issuecomment-148723148
.

[NickTomlin]

There's nothing reproducible or actionable in your issue (I use protractor and selenium behind a VPN without problems). I think these sorts of things are best handled outside of the issues queue until we can actually isolate what the issue is.

Please feel free to update your issue with more details and an isolated problem, but try to keep debugging/discovery questions in more productive channels. Keeping the issue queue clean makes it easier to actually solve problems once we know what they are.

Hopefully that makes sense. I don't mean to come off as dismissive or harsh; I'm just trying to get you help in the most productive way :)

[rbirbeck]

FWIW, I am experiencing the same issue - I'd happily help try and identify the underlying problem (in the appropriate channel of course :wink: ).

[szikszail]

I can use protractor, with vpn too. It seems to me that it could be some wrong configuration in your vpn somewhere or in your firewall.

[juliemr]

As Nick said, we're able to run on vpn fine, we can't reproduce this to investigate. I'm going to close this particular issue, but @rbirbeck @jlin412 if you have a set of steps we can use to repro on a particular VPN, please go ahead and open a new issue listing those. Thanks!!

[marcstober]

I know this is a closed issue, and I'll repost this elsewhere if needed, but I'm having this issue as well. The issue is that protractor is using a VPN-assigned IP address to connect to the Selenium server (e.g, 172.x.xx) when automatically started in standalone mode. For whatever reason the server is accessible as "localhost" or "127.0.0.1" but not using the IP address assigned by the VPN adapter. It also responds to local NAT address (e.g., 192.168.x.x).

It would be nice if you could specify in the protractor config an address for that standalone server. (Ideally you would fix your VPN issue, but that might not always be feasible.) For example, by adding a "standalone: true" which would let you specify a seleniumAddress even in standalone mode. An added benefit is that it could be make the config files more clear that you are in standalone or not, rather than being inferred from other properties being set:

{
  standalone: true,
  seleniumAddress: 'http://localhost:4444/wd/hub'
}

[marcstober]

To follow up on my previous comment (for anyone who finds this issue searching for "protractor vpn issue"), you can add localSeleniumStandaloneOpts to the config as follows to get it to work:

exports.config = {
    localSeleniumStandaloneOpts: {
        loopback: true
    },
}

See also this change to Selenium which was made to help deal with this issue: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/issues/1066