Missing webserver when running protractor tests

[joelwkent]

The protractor tests specs included in this repo use http://localhost:8080 but as far as I can tell there is no gulp task that sets up a local webserver at port 8080. To run the protractor tests locally I added gulp-webserver and configured it to start a webserver on port 8080. I then ran the following:

1. gulp webserver (task to start the webserver on 8080)
2. gulp webdriver-standalone (task to start the standalone selenium server)
3. gulp protractor (task to run all protractor test specs)

This works for me, the selenium automated tests run nicely in the browser.

My question is: is there a webserver already included somewhere in this project (I don't know all the npm packages inside out) or is it common practice to not include a webserver and let the developer use the server of their choice? Would people prefer that something like gulp-webserver (or http-server etc...) was included in the package.json with a gulp task to run it to view the examples and a task to run it as part of the protractor tests?

[joelwkent]

I propose the following actions and I'm happy to raise a PR (unless someone else has a burning desire to work on this). I wanted to mention them first to see if anyone disagrees, proposes alternatives or has additional ideas. If I don't hear anything in a week I'll get cracking:

1. Add gulp-webserver as a dev-dependency in the package
2. Add a gulp task to run the webserver for examples and protractor tests
3. Currently there is one protractor test that fails (validation-messages) so that needs to be resolved
4. Setup TravisCI to run the protractor tests with this repo
5. Longer term get better test coverage by adding protractor tests for more of the decorators

[Anthropic]

@joelwkent DO IT! 🍰 The bootstrap decorator needs you, it also needs to be updated to use the new builder like Material repo is. But one step at a time...