Please use Chromium instead of Chrome for testing suite

Dev
1

Hello Discourse team,

I noticed that your image/discourse_test/Dockerfile file installs Google Chrome. It would be great if you use Chromium instead, because it is free software and is virtually the same as Google Chrome, except for the lack of Flash and H.264 decoding features. The version of Chromium in Ubuntu’s repos is as recent as Google’s upstream version and I suspect that you don’t need any of the proprietary features.

Could you please use Chromium instead? It’s great to see that Discourse is free software, but it’s a downer that your testing suite is using proprietary software. I don’t want to run the tests I was planning working on because of this non-free package.

Running this on Xenial:

$ apt-cache policy chromium-browser
chromium-browser:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 68.0.3440.75-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
  Version table:
     68.0.3440.75-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/universe amd64 Packages
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/universe amd64 Packages
     49.0.2623.108-0ubuntu1.1233 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages

Thanks,
Andrew

3

We do use Chrome and some related libraries for tests, like https://github.com/GoogleChrome/chrome-launcher.

I don’t think we have the bandwidth to tackle this problem anytime soon, so would you like to work on a PR that makes our test system chromium compatible ?

9 Likes
4

I do not use discourse that much. Why is chrome used for?

5

Chrome headless is used to run our client side test suite.

1 Like
6

Hello Rafael,

Unfortunately I don’t have much bandwidth either. In case anyone is interested in working on this in the future, it looks like it’s possible to set the chromePath variable when calling chrome-launcher. Perhaps it could be set to point to the Chromium browser.

Thanks,
Andrew