PhantomJS as a RubyGem

DISCLAIMER: Alpha status, YMMV!

I am lazy as hell, and wanted to be able to install PhantomJS via Rubygems/Bundler when using poltergeist.

It keeps installations of phantomjs in $HOME/.phantomjs/VERSION/PLATFORM. When you call Phantomjs.path, it will return the path to the phantomjs executable in there. If that is not present, it will first fetch and install the prebuilt packages suitable for the current plattform (currently Linux 32/64 or OS X supported).

If there is a phantomjs executable in your $PATH that matches the version number packaged in this gem, this one will be used instead of installing one in your $HOME/.phantomjs.

You will need cURL or wget on your system. For extraction, bunzip2 and tar are required on Linux, and unzip on OS X. They should be installed already.

TL;DR: Instead of manually installing phantomjs on your machines, use this gem. It will take care of it.

require 'phantomjs'
Phantomjs.path # => path to a phantom js executable suitable to your current platform. Will install before return when not installed yet.

# Or run phantomjs with the passed arguments:
Phantomjs.run('./path/to/script.js') # => returns stdout

# Also takes a block to receive each line of output:
Phantomjs.run('./path/to/script.js') { |line| puts line }

Add this to your Gemfile:

group :test do
    gem 'poltergeist'
    gem 'phantomjs', :require => 'phantomjs/poltergeist'
end

This will automatically require (and install) phantomjs and configure Capybara in the same way as noted below for manual setup.

Note that you need to add poltergeist as a dependency explicitly since it is not a dependency of this gem in order to avoid forcing users to install poltergeist if the just want to use phantomjs itself.

Add gem 'phantomjs', :group => :test to your Gemfile and run bundle. In your test/spec helper, re-configure the Poltergeist capybara driver to use the phantomjs package from this gem:

require 'phantomjs' # <-- Not required if your app does Bundler.require automatically (e.g. when using Rails)
Capybara.register_driver :poltergeist do |app|
    Capybara::Poltergeist::Driver.new(app, :phantomjs => Phantomjs.path)
end

Check out the poltergeist docs for all the options you can pass in there.

The gem version consists of 4 digits: The first 3 indicate the phantomjs release installed via this gem, the last one is the internal version of this gem, in case I screw things up and need to push another release in the interim.

Warning: The spec_helper calls Phantomjs.implode when it is loaded, which purges the ~/.phantomjs directory. This is no bad thing, it just means every time you run the specs you'll download and install all three packages over, so tread with caution please. :)

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

(c) 2013-2014 Christoph Olszowka

Note that this project merely simplifies the installation of the entirely separate PhantomJS project via a Ruby gem. You can find the license information for PhantomJS at http://phantomjs.org/