ngMockE2E does not work with remote Selenium server - angularjs

Question

Setup
We use protractor, protractor-cucumber, and angular-mocks to handle our e2e tests. Builds are managed by grunt.
We have two build configs; pool and local. pool is the configuration that is picked up by our CI environment, local is for debugging purposes and is setup to run on a local machine. The primary difference between the two setups is that local runs everything locally, whereas pool uses a remote Selenium server (outside the CI server itself).
protractor.conf.js:
exports.config = {
params: {
widgetUrl: 'http://localhost:9980',
vudUrl: 'xxx',
testDelay: 3000,
},
// The timeout for each script run on the browser. This should be longer
// than the maximum time your application needs to stabilize between tasks.
allScriptsTimeout: 150000,
// A base URL for your application under test. Calls to protractor.get()
// with relative paths will be prepended with this.
baseUrl: 'http://localhost:' + (process.env.PORT || '9082'),
// list of files / patterns to load in the browser
specs: ['./e2e/features/*.feature'],
cucumberOpts: {
require: ['./e2e/steps/*.js', './e2e/pageObjects/*.js', './e2e/support/*.js'],
format: 'pretty',
tags: ['#context-test']
},
// Patterns to exclude.
exclude: [],
// ----- Capabilities to be passed to the webdriver instance ----
//
// For a full list of available capabilities, see
// https://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/DesiredCapabilities
// and
// https://code.google.com/p/selenium/source/browse/javascript/webdriver/capabilities.js
capabilities: {
browserName: 'chrome',
loggingPrefs: {
'driver': 'INFO',
'server': 'INFO',
'browser': 'INFO'
}
},
// ----- The test framework -----
//
// Jasmine and Cucumber are fully supported as a test and assertion framework.
// Mocha has limited beta support. You will need to include your own
// assertion framework if working with mocha.
framework: 'custom',
frameworkPath: 'node_modules/protractor-cucumber-framework',
mocks: {
dir: "mocks", // path to directory with mocks
default: []
},
onPrepare: function() {
// Chai config
var chai = require('chai');
var chaiAsPromised = require('chai-as-promised');
chai.use(chaiAsPromised);
global.expect = chai.expect;
console.log('params: ' + JSON.stringify(browser.params));
//browser.driver.manage().window().maximize();
}
};
We configure our mocks in a Before hook (snipped here for brevity):
this.Before(function(scenario, callback) {
// ...
let data = require(`${TEST_DATA_DIR}/default.js`);
let httpMocker = function() {
angular.module('httpMocker', ['ngMockE2E'])
.run(function($httpBackend) {
$httpBackend.whenPOST(...);
};
browser.addMockModule('httpMocker', httpMocker, {data})
// ...
callback();
});
Problem
Despite identical test setups, ngMockE2E is not being called when run in the CI environment. This can be demonstrated by the following test:
test.feature:
#Test
Feature: Test and debug
#context-test
Scenario: Get console output
Given I access the page
Then I get the log output
test.steps.js
module.exports = function() {
this.Given(/^I access the page$/, () => {
util.waitAndDo(() => true);
});
this.Then(/^I get the log output$/, () => {
util.waitAndDo(() => {
browser.manage().logs().get('browser').then(function(browserLog) {
console.log('log: ' + require('util').inspect(browserLog));
});
})
});
};
This test will dump the browser log rather than actually testing anything. When it is run locally, the logs are empty. However, when the same test is run in the CI environment, the logs show errors for failed calls to the URLs being mocked.
We have verified that the URLs used in the CI environment correctly match the regex in our mocks, so it is not a match-miss. The module is simply not being called.
To reiterate - the only major difference in configuration is that the pool config makes use of a remote Selenium hub. How could this affect how our tests are run, and why would it prevent our mocks from working?