Is your feature request related to a problem?

Here's the background: webdriverio-community/wdio-electron-service#331

tldr: we were stuck in getting Electron (dev mode, not prod) to start within WDIO. We've figured that the root cause is because NODE_OPTIONS was set on ChromeDriver. The NODE_OPTIONS (intended for WDIO) happens to cause issue in Electron.

Specifically, WDIO sets NODE_OPTIONS=' --loader ts-node/esm/transpile-only --no-warnings' (ref), which is carried over to ChromeDriver and, thus, Electron.

To verify the impact of this env, we can run: NODE_OPTIONS=' --loader ts-node/esm/transpile-only --no-warnings' ./node_modules/.bin/electron in Terminal, and Electron will crash.

Describe the solution you'd like.

We want to be able to to configure NODE_OPTIONS for ChromeDriver separately from the NODE_OPTIONS for WDIO.

Today NODE_OPTIONS for WDIO is carried over to ChromeDriver; in turn, it is carried over to Electron (dev mode), and Electron crashes because of it.

Here's the line that we want to inject NODE_OPTIONS only for ChromeDriver: https://github.com/webdriverio/webdriverio/blob/main/packages/wdio-utils/src/node/startWebDriver.ts#L86

We want to change it to something like:

driverProcess = cp.spawn(chromedriverExcecuteablePath, driverParams, { env: {...process.env, NODE_OPTIONS: configured_node_options } })

I would also consider adding shell: true, so it closely resembles when the Electron is started directly from command line.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

We could just filter out NODE_OPTIONS altogether as well like:

driverProcess = cp.spawn(chromedriverExcecuteablePath, driverParams, { env: { ...process.env, NODE_OPTIONS: null } })

This also might be preferable because it's more minimal, and we currently don't have a reason to set NODE_OPTIONS for ChromeDriver/Electron.

Additional context

We are trying to get wdio-electron-service to support testing against Electron (dev mode), not just prod mode.

Electron (prod mode) doesn't have the same problem because the prod mode forbids NODE_OPTIONS (ref).

cc @goosewobbler @christian-bromann

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