Dockerized Create React App doesn't open a new tab

Question

I noticed a strange behavior when running my app with Docker - it doesn't open a new tab. If I run my app manually with npm/yarn start, tab opens fine.

I don't have "BROWSER=none" in .env

Answer 1

It's because the create-react-app start script tries to open the local browser. Here's one of the relevant parts of the start script:

/**
 * Attempts to open the browser with a given URL.
 *
 * On Mac OS X, attempts to reuse an existing Chrome tab via AppleScript.
 *
 * Otherwise, falls back to [open](https://github.com/sindresorhus/open) behavior.
 */
declare function openBrowser(url: string): boolean;
export = openBrowser;

However, if your application is running in a docker container, it's like it is running on a separate machine, or VM. Which doesn't have a browser installed.

And the way Docker containers work, they can't just invoke programs of the host machine (without rather complex workarounds).