phantomjs-prebuilt-that-works

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

Automatically falls back to other CDNs if the main one is down or oversaturated. Hence the name of this fork.

Installing

As a library:

npm install phantomjs-prebuilt-that-works

As a cli command:

npm install -g phantomjs-prebuilt-that-works

CLI

phantomjs [phantom arguments]

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-prebuilt-that-works')
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
})

Or exec() method is also provided for convenience:

var phantomjs = require('phantomjs-prebuilt-that-works')
var program = phantomjs.exec('phantomjs-script.js', 'arg1', 'arg2')
program.stdout.pipe(process.stdout)
program.stderr.pipe(process.stderr)
program.on('exit', code => {
  // do something on end
})

Note: childProcess.spawn() is called inside exec().

Running with WebDriver

run() method detects when PhantomJS gets ready. It's handy to use with WebDriver (Selenium).

var phantomjs = require('phantomjs-prebuilt-that-works')
var webdriverio = require('webdriverio')
var wdOpts = { desiredCapabilities: { browserName: 'phantomjs' } }

phantomjs.run('--webdriver=4444').then(program => {
  webdriverio.remote(wdOpts).init()
    .url('https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/')
    .getTitle().then(title => {
      console.log(title) // 'Mozilla Developer Network'
      program.kill() // quits PhantomJS
    })
})

Using PhantomJS from disk

If you plan to install phantomjs many times on a single machine, you can install the phantomjs binary on PATH. The installer will automatically detect and use that for non-global installs.

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:

There is no requirement to install Qt, WebKit, or any other libraries. It however still relies on Fontconfig (the package fontconfig or libfontconfig, depending on the distribution).

Troubleshooting

Installation fails with spawn ENOENT

This is NPM's way of telling you that it was not able to start a process. It usually means:

• node is not on your PATH, or otherwise not correctly installed.
• tar is not on your PATH. This package expects tar on your PATH on Linux-based platforms.

Check your specific error message for more information.

Installation fails with Error: EPERM or operation not permitted or permission denied

This error means that NPM was not able to install phantomjs to the file system. There are three major reasons why this could happen:

• You don't have write access to the installation directory.
• The permissions in the NPM cache got messed up, and you need to run npm cache clean to fix them.
• You have over-zealous anti-virus software installed, and it's blocking file system writes.

Installation fails with Error: read ECONNRESET or Error: connect ETIMEDOUT

This error means that something went wrong with your internet connection, and the installer was not able to download the PhantomJS binary for your platform. Please try again.

I tried again, but I get ECONNRESET or ETIMEDOUT consistently.

Do you live in China, or a country with an authoritarian government? We've seen problems where the GFW or local ISP blocks github, preventing the installer from downloading the binary.

Try visiting the download page manually. If that page is blocked, you can try using a different CDN with the PHANTOMJS_CDNURL env variable described above.

I am behind a corporate proxy that uses self-signed SSL certificates to intercept encrypted traffic.

You can tell NPM and the PhantomJS installer to skip validation of ssl keys with NPM's strict-ssl setting:

npm set strict-ssl false

WARNING: Turning off strict-ssl leaves you vulnerable to attackers reading your encrypted traffic, so run this at your own risk!

I tried everything, but my network is b0rked. What do I do?

If you install PhantomJS manually, and put it on PATH, the installer will try to use the manually-installed binaries.

I'm on Debian or Ubuntu, and the installer failed because it couldn't find node

Some Linux distros tried to rename node to nodejs due to a package conflict. This is a non-portable change, and we do not try to support this. The official documentation recommends that you run apt-get install nodejs-legacy to symlink node to nodejs on those platforms, or many NodeJS programs won't work properly.

License

Copyright 2012 A Medium Corporation.

Copyright 2015 Julian Gruber.

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