What is the difference between running Protractor with and without Selenium WebDriver

Question

When I checked the protractor documentation. I saw that there is an option to run protractor without using Selenium server and by using directConnect: true flag.

I want to understand that what is the difference between running protractor tests using a selenium server and without using a selenium server other than the fact that only Chrome, Firefox are supported for the latter case?

Answer 1

If directConnect is true then it will run the tests without using the selenium server. Where selenium server means a setup similar to Selenium Grid. Running tests using Selenium Server allows us to run tests on the remote machine or on the local machine and provides an option to distribute execution load among different nodes. It is also possible to run ta est on multiple browsers at the same time using selenium server.

While directConnect false will run test only on your local installation of FireFox and Chrome. It will run the test on the same machine where test codebase exist.