Parallel-test Cucumber watir testing with phantomjs ECONREFUSED - cucumber

Question

I`m having issues with phantomjs with my parallel testing, firefox is running fine. I use parallel_tests, watir-webdriver, and Cucumber.
No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. - connect(2) for "127.0.0.1" port 8910 (Errno::ECONNREFUSED)
Tests are running via:
parallel_cucumber features/parallel_tests -n 3
After some debugging I figured the problem appears when first process is finished with testing, it somehow kills all phantomjs browser instances.
This is env.rb setup:
browser = Watir::Browser.new :phantomjs, args: %w(--ignore-ssl-errors=true)
Before do
#browser = browser
#browser.cookies.clear
end
at_exit do
browser.close
end
I also tried not closing browser at all, but with no luck, it is somehow done automatically.
I tried both Windows, and CentOS.
phantomjs -v
2.0.0
Using cucumber 1.3.19
Using selenium-webdriver 2.45.0
Using watir-webdriver 0.6.11
Using parallel 1.4.1
Using parallel_tests 1.3.9
I have a feeling it is a phantomjs/webdriver bug...

Answer 1

This is likely a race condition to port 8910 by your 3 phantom instances. Similar to this issue.
# env.rb
Before do
sleep ENV['TEST_ENV_NUMBER'].to_i
#browser = Watir::Browser.new :phantomjs, args: %w(--ignore-ssl-errors=true)
end
If I'm reading the ParallelTests source correctly, environment variable TEST_ENV_NUMBER is set to the process index for each process. So the first process has a TEST_ENV_NUMBER of 0. As long as that's the case, the Before hook above will sleep for that number of seconds before initializing Watir::Browser. That will stagger the the parallelization a bit, but it should remove the race condition.