If we're willing to make undefined a special case we could have the default be:

• Look for [ng-app], [ng:app], and if exactly one result is found use that
• Otherwise, use body (or maybe throw an error?)

Whoa, I was just about to open an issue on this topic, good to see this is something the protractor team is looking into.

I sporadically get errors like:

Error: Error while waiting for Protractor to sync with the page: "root element (body) has no injector. this may mean it is not inside ng-app."
Stacktrace:
Error: Error while waiting for Protractor to sync with the page: "root element (body) has no injector. this may mean it is not inside ng-app."
at Error ()
==== async task ====
Protractor.waitForAngular()
at [object Object]. (/home/ubuntu/skraphaug/angular/test/e2e/home_page_spec.js.coffee:39:37)
==== async task ====
Asynchronous test function: it()
Error
at [object Object]. (/home/ubuntu/skraphaug/angular/test/e2e/home_page_spec.js.coffee:38:7)
at [object Object]. (/home/ubuntu/skraphaug/angular/test/e2e/home_page_spec.js.coffee:28:5)
at Object. (/home/ubuntu/skraphaug/angular/test/e2e/home_page_spec.js.coffee:6:3)
at Object. (/home/ubuntu/skraphaug/angular/test/e2e/home_page_spec.js.coffee:127:4)
at Object.loadFile (/home/ubuntu/skraphaug/angular/node_modules/coffee-script/lib/coffee-script/register.js:16:19)
at require (module.js:380:17)
at Function.promise (/home/ubuntu/nvm/v0.10.33/lib/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/q/q.js:650:9)
at _fulfilled (/home/ubuntu/nvm/v0.10.33/lib/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/q/q.js:797:54)
at self.promiseDispatch.done (/home/ubuntu/nvm/v0.10.33/lib/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/q/q.js:826:30)
at Promise.promise.promiseDispatch (/home/ubuntu/nvm/v0.10.33/lib/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/q/q.js:759:13)
at /home/ubuntu/nvm/v0.10.33/lib/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/q/q.js:525:49
at flush (/home/ubuntu/nvm/v0.10.33/lib/node_modules/protractor/node_modules/q/q.js:108:17)
at process._tickCallback (node.js:419:13)

While for us, our homepage declares ng-app on the html tag,

Which lead me to this thread on SO
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20059943/running-into-error-while-waiting-for-protractor-to-sync-with-the-page-with-basic

Would you suggest just adding root-element of html in my conf.js file? Why is it that the majority of the time protractor doesn't throw this error, when the default root element is body but that is not where I have set my ng-app at.

If body is not the root element of your ng-app, you should specify what element is in your conf.js, yes

@sjelin thanks, I've specified rootElement: 'html' now in my cont.js file, just extremely curious as to why protractor 90% of the time never complained that it was looking for the rootElement on body, with my ng-app being defined on html

Please ask questions like this on stack overflow. (Also I think that angular isn't loading properly)

@sjelin I think I've got a fix that works. I'll post (and answer) a stackoverflow question and delete this.

EDIT: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28908878/protractor-tests-find-no-injector-in-my-app-but-only-on-jenkins

+1 for looking for [ng-app], [ng:app] and defaulting to body if 0 or >1 results found.

I've set rootElement: 'html' but I still get the error in a test that involves a redirect/reload not triggered by the control flow. I posted detailed information on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30783518/protractor-test-sometimes-fails-when-reloading-angular-app

Hello, I have been reading about this issue that randomly, my protractor test is failing because of the same error mentioned above (Error while waiting for Protractor to sync with the page: "root element (body) has no injector. this may mean it is not inside ng-app.) Is there a solution there that guarantees consistency? My application does the bootstrapping manually, so the ng-app is set to body but sometimes I get this error. I have tried to set rootElement: 'html' but the tests fail sometimes. Can you please advise guys if you have found a solution for this? Thanks in advance.

Please ask support questions on stack overflow. Also, you probably want rootElement: 'body'

Ok, thanks!

I updated to Protractor 3.2.1, and I get the following error:
Error while waiting for Protractor to sync with the page: "window.angular is undefined.  This could be either because this is a non-angular page or because your test involves client-side navigation, which can interfere with Protractor's bootstrapping.  See http://git.io/v4gXM for details"

ng-app is on html tag, and there is an ng-controller directive on the body tag.

I tried setting rootElement: 'html', but that did not seem to make a difference.

I did not get this error in Protractor 3.1.1

Does your test involve a non-angular page? Or client-side navigation (i.e. clicking on a link)? Did you check the URL for details?

The test does not involve a non-angular page. By client-side navigation, I'm confused. Do you mean navigation that uses ng routing? i.e. we are using angular-ui-router, so the only links we have keep the user on the same page, just a different path after the /#/

But those links are everywhere in our app, and we need to test them in our automated tests. And the confusing part about the link is:

• issue is closed
• description says to just add a better error message

The workaround seems to be calling browser.refresh() after clicking on a link - does that actually add another browser refresh in this instance? It seems like a risky workaround.

I guess I should be adding this info to that (closed) issue, but I thought that it had more to do with my rootElement being in the html tag, and controller in the body tag. And I could not recreate in 3.1.1, only 3.2.1.

I also tried the workaround mentioned in the link below, but that did nothing:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34600052/protractor-throwing-error-now-that-ng-app-directive-is-on-html-tag

workaround I tried: rootElement: '[ng-app="ourApp"]'

Hey, thanks for the quick response! Protractor is amazing, but it is really hard keeping up with browser and selenium versions. New stuff keeps coming in and breaking everything!!

If the links never cause a page to unload then it's not a client-side navigation problem (probably). Could you get me a small reproduction of this problem? Preferably in a small github repo? And make a separate issue for it (since this is a discussion not a bug report)?

Sorry for my messages, please disregard them. I was using gulp-protractor, and assumed that it was using protractor as a peer dependency. My issue is related to my own setup; nothing with protractor itself.

This is also going to become interesting as Angular2 hits, where we have no ng-app helper. I'm not sure there's much we can do there. But we can still help out for 1.5.

Pending and version 5.0, we'll be changing this to the following:

• config.rootElement now defaults to ''
• If you are an ng2 app, '' is equivalent to useAllAngular2AppRoots
• If you are an ng1 app, and you are using version ~1.3.12 or >=1.4.0-beta.3 of angular.js, '' defaults to the element you bootstrap to.
• If you are an ng1 app, and you are using an older version of angular.js, we will automatically search for injectors in <body> and elements tagged with either ng-app or ng-controller.

This should find your root element almost all the time.