Firefox doesn't run on GitLab (as root)

[pkly]

Hello, I've build an image adding docker stuff on top of cypress/included:cypress-13.15.0-node-20.17.0-chrome-129.0.6668.70-1-ff-130.0.1-edge-129.0.2792.52-1, but when I run it in CI it complains that firefox is not installed?

You can also use a custom browser: https://on.cypress.io/customize-browsers
Available browsers found on your system are:
 - chrome
 - edge
 - electron

I'm not sure what happened along the way to make firefox no longer available in CI.

Sorry if this is my error, but I'm confused how could I remove an entire browser by simply installing docker and running npm install -g typescript ts-node in said image.

[MikeMcC399]

@pkly

Possibly you are running into the problem Firefox not found.

• Which CI provider are you using?
• How are you running your Docker image?

[MikeMcC399]

BTW typescript is already globally installed (although that is not documented)

$ docker run -it --rm --entrypoint bash cypress/included:13.15.0 -c "npm ls -g"
/usr/local/lib
+-- corepack@0.29.3
+-- cypress@13.15.0
+-- npm@10.8.2
`-- typescript@5.6.2

[pkly]

@MikeMcC399 gitlab ci's on a custom runner, it's just a docker image built on top of the original one with some stuff added, I didn't explicitly specify a user for the runner though, so that could be it maybe

[MikeMcC399]

@pkly

If you add

firefox --version

into your GitLab workflow, you should get a usable error message if you are running the container under the (default) root user.

This is the message for GitHub. Check which uid is mentioned by GitLab and run your container under that uid

Run firefox --version
  firefox --version
  shell: sh -e {0}
Running Firefox as root in a regular user's session is not supported.  ($HOME is /github/home which is owned by uid 1001.)
Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

• Firefox not found with root user and non-root $HOME cypress#27121 is an open issue to improve the Cypress error message in this situation.

[pkly]

@MikeMcC399

Thanks for the suggestion, after running the command in gitlab-ci and changing the user to the one spewed out it seems like the browser wants to launch, but gets confused as to where it's HOME is, since now I get Fontconfig error: No writable cache directories, which did not happen before setting user, and chrome launched fine, now it doesn't.

For the time being I'll probably drop firefox testing and maybe look into fixing it by just bruteforcing firefox to be able to be ran as a root user, since that creates less issues overall, and it's only in an image so it basically doesn't matter.

Additionally I kind of have to run cypress as root in that scenario because of some cursed things we have to do to prepare our full test suite. At this time I need docker to run commands, though I might look into allowing things to run through a http api instead, which would eliminate the need to even modify the image in the first place.

[MikeMcC399]

@pkly

Thanks for your progress report and I'm sorry to hear you weren't able to get this to work so far.

Could you please change the title of your post, for example "Firefox doesn't run on GitLab"? The current title is misleading for anybody with the same issue.

[MikeMcC399]

@pkly

There is a simple working example of running Firefox in GitLab CI on the Cypress documentation site using a Cypress Docker image cypress/browsers:

Testing with Cypress Docker Images as .gitlab-ci.yml

stages:
  - test

test:
  image: cypress/browsers:node-20.14.0-chrome-126.0.6478.114-1-ff-127.0.1-edge-126.0.2592.61-1
  stage: test
  script:
    # install dependencies
    - npm ci
    # start the server in the background
    - npm start &
    # run Cypress tests
    - npx cypress run --browser firefox

[pkly]

Thanks, but as mentioned already my setup requires me to start about 20 different services and then have access to docker to run some commands on them (from inside cypress), because of which cypress itself must contain docker (as a separate image), and it needs access to docker (so root), so that example does nothing for me.

[MikeMcC399]

@pkly

We would need a reproducible failing example in order to investigate this issue further. I successfully ran the following simple pipeline on GitLab, testing against Firefox. This runs by default as root (uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)):

stages:
  - test

test:
  image: 
    name: cypress/included:13.15.0
    entrypoint: [""]
  stage: test
  script:
    - npx cypress verify
    - npx cypress cache list
    - id
    - firefox --version
    - npx cypress run --browser firefox

$ id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)
$ firefox --version
Mozilla Firefox 130.0.1
$ npx cypress run --browser firefox
DevTools listening on ws://127.0.0.1:33287/devtools/browser/cd3af526-128f-4ca5-96b9-69eee9429ba2
====================================================================================================
  (Run Starting)
  ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │ Cypress:        13.15.0                                                                        │
  │ Browser:        Firefox 130 (headless)                                                         │
  │ Node Version:   v20.17.0 (/usr/local/bin/node)                                                 │
  │ Specs:          1 found (spec.cy.js)                                                           │
  │ Searched:       cypress/e2e/**/*.cy.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}                                            │
  └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

[pkly]

I'll drop in the full docker file tomorrow