Chapter 1, Getting Started with PhantomJS, introduces the PhantomJS browser and how to work with it from the shell. It covers installing PhantomJS and how to run it with different command-line arguments.

Chapter 2, PhantomJS Core Modules, discusses the core modules in PhantomJS, such as phantom and system, and covers how to use the fs module to work with the filesystem. The chapter also explains how to create your own modules and load them into your PhantomJS scripts.

Chapter 3, Working with webpage Objects, introduces webpage objects and includes sophisticated strategies for dealing with web page content. You will learn how to interact with the page, simulate events, and capture those interactions for successful tests.

Chapter 4, Unit Testing with PhantomJS, explores how to use PhantomJS as an environment for JavaScript unit tests. This chapter focuses on the Jasmine BDD testing framework, but will also introduce two other popular frameworks, Mocha and QUnit.

Chapter 5, Functional and End-to-end Testing with PhantomJS, demonstrates functional and end-to-end testing strategies with PhantomJS. The chapter surveys several different functional testing tools, including Selenium, Poltergeist (a driver for Capybara), and CasperJS.

Chapter 6, Network Monitoring and Performance Analysis, illustrates how to perform automated performance analysis with PhantomJS. The chapter explores topics such as how to generate a HAR file for waterfall analysis, and how to use libraries such as confess.js and YSlow for automated performance analysis.

Chapter 7, Generating Images and Documents with PhantomJS, shows how to generate images and PDFs with PhantomJS. The chapter provides an overview of PhantomJS' built-in image rendering features and explains how to apply them.

Chapter 8, Continuous Integration with PhantomJS, demonstrates PhantomJS as part of a continuous integration (CI) strategy. The chapter surveys CI, using Jenkins as its specimen, and shows how to fail builds on that system, concluding with a recipe for comprehensive CI example.

By and large, the only things that you will need for the recipes in this cookbook are your normal web development toolkit and PhantomJS. For most recipes, you will not need anything more than a terminal and a text editor or IDE. Some recipes, such as those that discuss functional testing or continuous integration, will require other specific pieces of software to be installed (for example, Selenium, Capybara, Jenkins, and so on), but those requirements will be discussed in context with those recipes.

Also, many of the recipes in this book illustrate their principles by executing against a Node.js-based demonstration application. If you wish to follow along with the recipes exactly as is, you will need to have Node.js version 0.10.2 or greater installed on your system.

The PhantomJS Cookbook is targeted at experienced web developers who are interested in using PhantomJS to add a comprehensive testing strategy to their development workflows. This book assumes that you already have knowledge of the foundational front-end development skills (such as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS) and some experience with testing fundamentals. Some familiarity with PhantomJS is beneficial but not strictly required. Lastly, some recipes may involve some other programming languages (for example, Java or Ruby) and these will be called out where necessary.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can launch the PhantomJS REPL from the command line using the phantomjs command."

A block of code is set as follows:

var system = require('system');
system.args.forEach(function(arg, i) {
  console.log(i + ' = ' + arg);
});
phantom.exit();

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

phantom.onError = function onErrorFn(msg, trace) {
  console.error('[PHANTOMJS ERROR] ' + msg);
  phantom.exit(1);
};

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

phantomjs --cookies-file=cookie-jar access-secure-site.js

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Lastly, click on Save to persist the changes to this job."

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