Book Image

Getting Started with PhantomJS

By : Aries beltran
Book Image

Getting Started with PhantomJS

By: Aries beltran

Overview of this book

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit browser with JavaScript API that allows you to create new ways to automate web testing. PhantomJS is currently being used by a large number of users to help them integrate headless web testing into their development processes. It also gives you developers a new framework to create web-based applications, from simple web manipulation to performance measurement and monitoring.A step step-by by-step guide that will help you develop new tools for solving web and testing problems in an effective and quick way. The book will teach you how to use and maximize PhantomJS to develop new tools for web scrapping, web performance measurement and monitoring, and headless web testing. This book will help you understand PhantomJS’ scripting API capabilities and strengths.This book starts by looking at PhantomJS’ JavaScript API, features, and basic execution of scripts. Throughout the book, you will learn details to help you write scripts to manipulate web documents and fully create a web scrapping tool.Through its practical approach, this book strives to teach you by example, where each chapter focuses on the common and practical usage of PhantomJS, and how to extract meaningful information from the web and other services.By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills to enable you to use PhantomJS for web testing, as well as learning the basics of Jasmine, and how it can be used with PhantomJS.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Keeping cookies

In PhantomJS, cookies are not persistent by default. All cookies and cookie manipulation in our script will be destroyed and gone after the script execution. Each time we call our script, it will recreate the cookies again as if we had not visited the page before. If we need to persist with our cookies (like browsers do), we need to specify a cookie file. This cookie file will save all cookies from the different sites and domains we visit into a text file. The cookie file is passed in via the PhantomJS command line:

phantomjs –cookies-file=~/phantomjs/cookies.txt cookies1.js

If the cookie file does not exist yet, PhantomJS will create one; if it does exist, then it will load the cookies from the file we specified.