Selenium on Heroku

I spent a lot of time beating my head around the Selenium WebDriver in NodeJs that works locally on my Windows machine and easily deploys to Heroku. I finally got it working using PhantomJs as the headless browser. I was able to get Chrome and Firefox working locally, but not on Heroku. Here are the steps I took to get it working:

1. Install PhantomJS 2.1.1

http://phantomjs.org/download.html

2. Set up a Heroku app with an additional buildpack for PhantomJs:

https://github.com/stomita/heroku-buildpack-phantomjs

3. Set up a simple NodeJs/Express app. I am currently on NodeJS LTS 6.10.3. Selenium-WebDriver will not work on node < 6.

package.json:

{
  "name": "untitled2",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node index.js",
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "express": "^4.15.2",
    "selenium-webdriver": "^3.4.0"
  },
  "engines": {
    "node": "6.10.3",
    "npm": "4.5.0"
  }
}

4. Expose a simple /test endpoint on your app to do the Selenium-WebDriver "Hello World" example:

index.js

var webdriver = require('selenium-webdriver');
var express = require('express')
var app = express()

var port = process.env.PORT || 14000;
var By = webdriver.By;

app.get('/test', function (req, res) {
    var driver = new webdriver.Builder()
        .forBrowser('phantomjs')
        .build();
    driver.get('http://www.google.com/ncr');
    driver.findElement(By.name('q')).sendKeys('webdriver');
    driver.findElement(By.name('btnG')).click();
    driver.wait(function() {
        return driver.getTitle().then(function(title) {
            console.log(title);
            return title === 'webdriver - Google Search';
        });
    }, 5000).then(function() {
        res.status(200).send('Done');
    }, function(error) {
        res.status(200).send(error);
    });
    driver.quit();
});

app.listen(port, function () {
    console.log('Example app listening on port: ',port)
})

Notes:

• I copied phantomjs.exe straight into my project root. It should also work if you just install it and change your PATH variables to point to the installed location of phantomjs.exe
• I am using a local port of 14000. So you can run it and go to http://localhost:14000/test to try it out.
• I have it set to a 5 second timeout. If it times out, the promise will return an error and output: {"name":"TimeoutError"}
• When pushing to Heroku you can watch for the PhantomJS Buildpack to be installed successfully:

remote: -----> Build succeeded!

remote: -----> PhantomJS app detected

remote: -----> Extracting PhantomJS 2.1.1 binaries to /tmp/build_a6395fe7656f5bfcbfc7cfa31d3f8381/vendor/phantomjs

remote: -----> exporting PATH and LIBRARY_PATH