Tests sporadically fail with 'Unable to connect to mozilla geckodriver' errors

[xtrasimplicity]

Summary

Most of the time, the tests pass without any issues, however, occasionally they fail with unable to connect to Mozilla geckodriver 127.0.0.1:4445 (Selenium::WebDriver::Error::WebDriverError).
See #369 (comment) for reference.

Expected Behavior

The tests will pass continuously.

Current Behavior

Tests sporadically fail with:

unable to connect to Mozilla geckodriver 127.0.0.1:4445 (Selenium::WebDriver::Error::WebDriverError)

Possible Solution

This is often caused by Firefox upgrades leading to incompatibilities with a specific version of Selenium WebDriver, but given the sporadicity of this issue, I don't imagine this would be the cause.

Steps to Reproduce (for bugs)

1. Rerun the tests on CI.
2. Cross your fingers and hope they fail. ;)

[radar]

I have a suspicion that this is due to a Geckodriver / Firefox incompatibility. Which would be strange!

I am trying to reproduce this over on travis-ci.org/radar/cucumber-rails, but I am quickly running out of time today to see if I can fix this issue.

I suspect that gobijan#5 might fix these issues. I don't know for certain!

[xtrasimplicity]

@radar Thanks heaps for working on this. Unfortunately, it hasn't resolved the issue - but I think we should merge the other PR anyway, as it won't impact on a user's ability to use the new release. We can continue to temporarily circumvent it by restarting the failing jobs.

I'll leave this issue open. :)

[xtrasimplicity]

Looking at the errors with geckodriver -V, and the source code in geckodriver-helper, it is failing to download the latest geckodriver binary.

In a different branch, I've updated the travis CI config file to download geckodriver directly, extract it, and run the daemon (rather than have Selenium trigger the daemon). It seems to be working well, so fingers crossed!

[radar]

Could it potentially be failing because it is hitting GitHub’s API limit?

…

On 20 Apr 2018, 21:45 +1000, Andrew ***@***.***>, wrote: Looking at the errors with geckodriver -V, and the source code in geckodriver-helper, it is failing to download the latest geckodriver binary. In a different branch, I've updated the travis CI config file to download geckodriver directly, extract it, run the daemon (rather than have Selenium trigger the daemon). It seems to be working well, so fingers crossed! — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[xtrasimplicity]

@radar It looks like that may be the case, yes.

[xtrasimplicity]

(For reference: @radar has submitted a PR (#5) to DevicoSolutions/geckodriver-helper to resolve this issue in the future.)

[xtrasimplicity]

The PR upstream has been merged and has been released to rubygems.org!

[radar]

Great! Thanks for following this up @xtrasimplicity

[xtrasimplicity]

Not a problem at all! :)