BrowserStack tunnel not launching automatically

[aminer-looker]

I'm just getting started with using Karma & BrowserStack together, and I'm not able to get my tests to run with the default setup. I did the standard npm install, and added the following config:

    browserStack: {
      username: '********',
      accessKey: '*********'
      // startTunnel: false
    },

    customLaunchers: {
      browserstack_safari_mac: {
        base: "BrowserStack",
        browser: "safari",
        browser_version: "8.0",
        os: "OS X",
        os_version: "Yosemite"
      }
    },

    browsers: [
      "browserstack_safari_mac"
    ]

The first time I ran, it said it couldn't find the BrowserStack binary, so it downloaded it. Sure, fine. But, so long as I leave the startTunnel line commented out, I get the following error:

INFO [karma]: Karma v0.12.31 server started at http://localhost:9876/
INFO [launcher]: Starting browser safari 8.0 (OS X Yosemite) on BrowserStack
ERROR [launcher.browserstack]: Can not start safari 8.0 (OS X Yosemite)
  Error: getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND

If I change the startTunnel setting and manually run the BrowserStackLocal app, everything seems to work fine.

[zzo]

is this an error with browserstacktunnel? seems like a fix for this needs to go there?

[aminer-looker]

The problem seems to be that there's a slight delay between then the tunnel process is finished launching and when the tunnel is actually set up and ready to do work. One could make an argument for having it in either package, I suppose, but I thought it made sense to be here since it was this package which needed to hold off on further action.

[nbilyk]

I came across this (very old) thread because I had a similar issue (I believe this issue can be closed). The tunnel when using startTunnel wasn't working, but when I started the tunnel manually and provided a localIdentifier it worked.
The gotcha (I'm on Mac) is that if you are using startTunnel: true, either you need to close your local BrowserStackLocal instance, or you must also set localIdentifier in your config (it can be anything).

The symptoms I hit was similar except browserstack would connect, a session would start, the local browserstack connection would start, but browserstack wouldn't find the page.