Deprecated!

PhantomJS is no longer maintained, so neither is this. Use Headless chrome instead!

phantomjs

An NPM wrapper for PhantomJS version 2, headless webkit with JS API.

NOTE: phantomjs v2.x is currently under heavy development. Releases should be considered unstable.

This is a fork from Medium/phantomjs which beautifully installs phantomjs v1.9.x.

Building and Installing

npm install phantomjs2

Or grab the source and

node ./install.js

What this installer 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) and Linux based platforms (as identified by nodejs), using the pre-built binaries from https://github.com/bprodoehl/phantomjs/releases/

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('phantomjs2')
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 major and minor number tracks the version of PhantomJS that will be installed. The patch number is incremented when there is either an installer update or a patch build of the phantom binary.

Deciding Where To Get PhantomJS

By default, this package will download phantomjs from https://bitbucket.org/ariya/phantomjs/downloads. This should work fine for most people.

Downloading from a custom URL

If bitbucket is down, or the Great Firewall is blocking bitbucket, you have a few options:

Download from a phantomjs download mirror

To set a mirror, set npm config property phantomjs_cdnurl. The advantage of this approach is that it will carry over the proper detection of version and OS, however *the mirror must match the structure and naming conventions of https://bitbucket.org/ariya/phantomjs/downloads.

npm install phantomjs --phantomjs_cdnurl=http://cnpmjs.org/downloads

Or add property into your .npmrc file (https://www.npmjs.org/doc/files/npmrc.html)

phantomjs_cdnurl=http://cnpmjs.org/downloads

Another option is to use environment variable PHANTOMJS_CDNURL.

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

Or, specify a specific download location.

This is useful to entirely override the phantomjs download locaiton, i.e. if you wish to use a custom build. As of this writing there are lots of custom builds for phantomjs2, particularly to get it working on various flavors of linux. (see ariya/phantomjs#12948)

To set a specifc download location, set npm config property phantomjs_downloadurl.

npm install phantomjs --phantomjs_downloadurl=https://github.com/eugene1g/phantomjs/releases/download/2.0.0-bin/phantomjs-2.0.0-macosx.zip

or set the environment variable PHANTOMJS_DOWNLOADURL.

PHANTOMJS_DOWNLOADURL=https://github.com/eugene1g/phantomjs/releases/download/2.0.0-bin/phantomjs-2.0.0-macosx.zip npm install 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:

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.

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 bitbucket, preventing the installer from downloading the binary.

Try visiting the 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.

Contributing

Questions, comments, bug reports, and pull requests are all welcome. Submit them at the project on GitHub.

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

Authors (original)

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

Ported to phantomjs2 by zeevl

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).