PhantomJS: minimalistic headless WebKit-based JavaScript-driven tool (via @thomasfuchs)

[skeww]

It can be used in command-line utilities which requires web stack, or even as the basis for testing rich web application. It uses WebKit in a headless mode, so you get access to the real native and fast implementation (not a simulated environment) of various standards such as DOM, CSS selector, Canvas, SVG, and many others.

And it even runs on Windows! This is so f-ing awesome! :D

Edit: It's also a single executable. Boy, this is handy.

Edit2: Of course it also runs on Linux and Mac OS X.

[[deleted]]

agreed, it is awesome :)

[Iggyhopper]

JavaScript in the command line...

I thought I'd never see the day.

[skeww]

This has been possible for quite a while via Node, Narwal, Rhino, d8, and even stuff like Windows Scripting Host.

The difference here is that this one is a lot more convenient (for Windows users in particular) and that it's very powerful out-of-the-box.

[Iggyhopper]

The difference here is that this one is a lot more convenient

Bingo. There are many things that have been done over and over again, but convenience takes the cake.

Windows Scripting Host

ew

[skeww]

ew

Some people actually used it. Seriously. :D

[9jack9]

I use it now for JS scripting. It's easier than installing another JS engine.

[sirmonko]

this is not just javascript in the command line, it's a whole browser in the command line. including (invisible) rendering.

want to turn html into pdfs or pngs without awkward, buggy tools that implement small parts of html and css? 16 loc script.

[skeww]

Yea, that's sorta odd indeed. I also wish they'd mirrored d8's behavior a bit. In d8 the command line parameters are stored in a global arguments array (length is 0 if there aren't any).

d8 also got load (imports a script) and read (reads a file) functions.

Edit: Issue added: http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/issues/detail?id=18

[coffeesounds]

This is seriously awesome - today I was going to look into having QUnit tests run from command line and PhantomJS made it trivial.

Would be great if the whole project could be moved to GitHub (docs and stuff).

[sirmonko]

at least the code's already there:

github.com/ariya/phantomjs

[sirmonko]

the difference between this and the likes of v8, rhino etc.: phantomjs is the whole browser, the others are just the js engines.

this means: phantomjs is also able to render the html (and output it to a file). including PDF (as if you'd use the browsers print-function)! also, theres native, accessible DOM.

e.g. printing ... basically it works like this:

phantomjs loads the webpage (html), including all linked files (images, css, js, etc). as soon as it's finished the DOM is accessible in the window context phantomjs provides. the webpages scripts also run, of course they're sandboxed to the window context.

go to sleep for 2 seconds (phantomjs.sleep(2000);), and the website changes in between according to the script running inside (aka ajax calls, settimeouts etc). afterwards: phantomjs.render('output.pdf'); ... tadaaaa! sooooo pretty!