phantomjs

phantomjs

An NPM wrapper for PhantomJS, headless webkit with JS API.

Building and Installing

npm install phantomjs

Or grab the source and

node ./install.js

To use a mirror of the phantomjs binaries, set $PHANTOMJS_CDNURL, default is http://cdn.bitbucket.org/ariya/phantomjs/downloads

PHANTOMJS_CDNURL=http://cnpmjs.org/downloads npm install phantomjs

What this is really doing is just grabbing a particular "blessed" (by this module) version of Phantom. As new versions of Phantom are released and vetted, this module will be updated accordingly.

The package has been set up to fetch and run Phantom for MacOS (darwin), Linux based platforms (as identified by nodejs), and -- as of version 0.2.0 -- Windows (thanks to Domenic Denicola). If you spot any platform weirdnesses, let us know or send a patch.

Running

bin/phantomjs [phantom arguments]

And npm will install a link to the binary in node_modules/.bin as it is wont to do.

Running via node

The package exports a path string that contains the path to the phantomjs binary/executable.

Below is an example of using this package via node.

var path = require('path')
var childProcess = require('child_process')
var phantomjs = require('phantomjs')
var binPath = phantomjs.path

var childArgs = [
  path.join(__dirname, 'phantomjs-script.js'),
  'some other argument (passed to phantomjs script)'
]

childProcess.execFile(binPath, childArgs, function(err, stdout, stderr) {
  // handle results
})

Versioning

The NPM package version tracks the version of PhantomJS that will be installed, with an additional build number that is used for revisions to the installer.

As such 1.8.0-1 and 1.8.0-2 will both install PhantomJs 1.8 but the latter has newer changes to the installer.

A Note on PhantomJS

PhantomJS is not a library for NodeJS. It's a separate environment and code written for node is unlikely to be compatible. In particular PhantomJS does not expose a Common JS package loader.

This is an NPM wrapper and can be used to conveniently make Phantom available It is not a Node JS wrapper.

I have had reasonable experiences writing standalone Phantom scripts which I then drive from within a node program by spawning phantom in a child process.

Read the PhantomJS FAQ for more details: http://phantomjs.org/faq.html

Linux Note

An extra note on Linux usage, from the PhantomJS download page:

This package is built on CentOS 5.8. It should run successfully on Lucid or more modern systems (including other distributions). There is no requirement to install Qt, WebKit, or any other libraries. It is however expected that some base libraries necessary for rendering (FreeType, Fontconfig) and the basic font files are available in the system.

Contributing

Questions, comments, bug reports, and pull requests are all welcome. Submit them at the project on GitHub. If you haven't contributed to an Obvious project before please head over to the Open Source Project and fill out an OCLA (it should be pretty painless).

Bug reports that include steps-to-reproduce (including code) are the best. Even better, make them in the form of pull requests.

Author

Dan Pupius (personal website), supported by The Obvious Corporation.

License

Copyright 2012 The Obvious Corporation.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the top-level file LICENSE.txt and (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0).