Application hangs on app.start with version 7+

[fspinillo]

Currently in the process of evaluating bumping our Spectron version to match the Electron version of an app and am finding that when moving to version 7 app.start never completes. The current version we're on is Spectron v5 and it's worked with Electron 3, 4 and 5 without issues; spectron v6 works fine with Electron v5 as well. As soon as the version is bumped to v7 is when this issue manifests.

I've even used the bare bones example in the repo to target our distributed binary and the issue is still present. V5 and V6 successfully complete start.app, but v7 and v8 both hang.

[spChief]

add option to you application params:
chromeDriverArgs: ['remote-debugging-port=' + Math.floor(Math.random() * (9999 - 9000) + 9000)],
It might look like this:

app = new Spectron.Application({
        args: [path.join(__dirname, '..', '..')],
        webdriverOptions: {
            deprecationWarnings: false,
        },
        chromeDriverArgs: ['remote-debugging-port=' + Math.floor(Math.random() * (9999 - 9000) + 9000)],
    });

[255kb]

@spChief I can confirm that this works with Electron 6 + Spectron 8. It wasn't able anymore to "reach the application". Adding the remote debugging port solves it.

[HaNdTriX]

I've downgraded to spectron@5.0.0. That version works fine with electron@7.x.x. 😕

[255kb]

I correct what I said, adding the remote debugging port only solved it locally, but I wasn't able to run the tests in any CI (GitHub actions, CircleCI...) since Electron 5.
However, I added ELECTRON_DISABLE_SANDBOX: 1 environment variable in the CI config (see electron/electron#16662) and now everything runs fine both locally and in the CI.

[spChief]

It does not help for us, we are using dockers for CI jobs. In container this issue still exists, almost after adding port and disabling sandbox (tried env variable and arg --no-sandbox). Electron app just did not start at all (I used framebuffer and ffmpeg for capture). BUT - one of this hundreds tries I saw ONE success run. But I don't catch consistent pattern and just give up and downgrade electron to 5.*.

[255kb]

@spChief maybe my problem is unrelated to this issue then :(

[dannypaz]

Wanted to add a comment because this is happening locally for myself and team too. Spectron 9 w/ Electron 7 is no beuno, even with the suggested steps above.

[fspinillo]

The suggestion from @spChief is working for me.

Trying to use the default 9515 port did not work, so something must be up with the port being defined at run

[yetyman]

This is happening to me as well on Electron 10.1.5 and spectron 12.0.0. the random port solution has not changed my results and my application does start correctly, the spectron promise from start() never resolves however