Running Protractor in CircleCi parallelism

I was looking into making tests run in parallel in circleci to speed up tests. In Protractor, there is a capability to shard test files, but it doesn’t appear to help the speed of tests in CircleCI. I was looking and found https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/parallelism-faster-jobs/, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to use that with protractor, how does the command circleci tests glob REGEX_FILEPATH connects to my launching of protractor tests in my current circleci flow?

That CircleCI command will search for filenames based on the supplied regex value. Then it uses the $NODE_INDEX envars that we automatically generate in each container to split the list of filenames between the nodes. The command returns a separate chunk of names within each node based on the node index.You can try running that command in a run step it see that it correctly finds and splits your tests between each container. It should output the list to the UI.

You can then pass the outputted file list to Protractor so that it only performs tasks on the list of files for the specific node.

I’m actually getting no output from that command. Tried both absolute and relative. The step ended with no output and code 0