Tag Archives: casperjs

Software Development, Technology

Installing CasperJS on Raspberry Pi

Leave a comment

This is generally a simple process to install CapserJS on a *NIX box, but had not done this on a Raspberry Pi before, and ran into a couple of minor gotchas. This is a stripped down explanation of what I needed to do, but it will server as a reference for me, and maybe for some other people as well.

Prerequisites for installing CapserJS

  • Node
  • npm
  • PhantomJS

Node

Installing node is very simple, but you should grab root access to do it. This should be simple and run without any issues.

apt-get install nodejs

npm

The Node Package Manager will be used later to actually install CasperJS, once PhantomJS has been successfully installed.

apt-get install npm

PhantomJS

PhantomJS is a web automation framework, that CasperJS uses to run it’s extended suite of tools. NOTE. I found that I needed to modify my user’s (pi in this case) environment to tell Phantom that not to expect a console for rendering webpages; I’ll document that at the bottom.

apt-get install phantomjs

CasperJS

Installing CasperJS is done most simply via the npm (Node Package Manager):

npm install -g casperjs

Handling the PhantomJS Display Error

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ casperjs
QXcbConnection: Could not connect to display
PhantomJS has crashed. Please read the bug reporting guide at
and file a bug report.
Aborted

The fix is to add this line to the .bashrc file, which will stop the error. I simply added this to the last line of the file.

export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen

Software Development, Technology

casperJS – passing parameters on the command line (cli)

1 Comment

I like using the command line / shell to pass information to scripts and programs. Sure it has limitations but it’s generally pretty effective.

Each language seems to have it’s own method of handing them, and CasperJS does not seem to be any different. What I did find a little different from others, is how CapserJS splits out arguments from parameters (options in CapserJS speak).

Passing Arguments

Passing arguments is a fairly simple affair. His an example of passing some arguments on the command line to a screen capture utility I’m working on:

casperjs generic.screenshot.cjs http://www.someplace.com save_local
[
“http://www.someplace.com”,
“save_local”
]

They are placed into a list (integer indexed array), and can be addressed in the following way:

url = casper.cli.args[0];
mode = casper.cli.args[1];

This would result in ‘url’ = ‘http://www.someplace.com’ and ‘mode’ = ‘save_local’. Pretty straight forward. One major drawback, you must know the order of the parameters, add a new one, get one out of place and the entire house of cards collapses.

There is a better way!

Passing Parameters (options)

Passing options is a fairly simple affair as well. His an example of passing some option on the command line:

casperjs generic.screenshot.cjs –url=http://www.someplace.com –mode=save_local
{
“casper-path”: “/opt/casperjs”,
“cli”: true,
“url”: “http://www.someplace.com”,
“mode”: “save_local”
}

Note: “casper-path” and “cli” are injected automatically

They are placed into an array, and can be addressed in the following way:

url = casper.cli.options[‘url’];
mode = casper.cli.options[‘mode’];

This would result in ‘url’ = ‘http://www.someplace.com’ and ‘mode’ = ‘save_local’. Now, you do not need to worry about ordering of options, and adding more options doesn’t mean that you’ll have to worry about re-coding the variable localization, ordering etc. It’s also CLEAR to any user how the cli is formatted.

Now, go forth and parse, screen capture and automate your testing until your heart is content!

Software Development, Technology

Installing CasperJS 1.1.4 on AWS (CentOS)

Leave a comment

Installing CasperJS to work with PhantomJSs latest version 2.1.1

This is the current status of my test installation. My perviously hacked version of CaserpJS ( instructions are there: Helping CasperJS 1.1.0-beta3 play nice with PhantomJS 2.0.0 ), however it’s time to rev-up to the non-beta version of the code.

casperjs
CasperJS version 1.1.0-beta3 at /usr/lib/node_modules/casperjs, using phantomjs version 2.1.1

As of today:
Screen Shot 2016-02-08 at 10.42.19 AM

Step 1 — Clone CasperJS from Git

Hopefully you already have Git installed, and you are ready to clone:

git clone git://github.com/n1k0/casperjs.git
Cloning into ‘casperjs’…
remote: Counting objects: 14392, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (7/7), done.
remote: Total 14392 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 14385
Receiving objects: 100% (14392/14392), 8.50 MiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (8648/8648), done.
Checking connectivity… done.

Step 2 — Perform Installation

Using hints from the Instructions at CasperJS 1.1.0-DEV documentation, I first located my current casper image, moved it aside, then linked the new one into it’s location.

whereis casperjs
casperjs: /usr/bin/casperjs /usr/local/bin/casperjs /opt/n1k0-casperjs-e3a77d0/bin/casperjs /opt/casperjs/bin/casperjs /opt/casperjs/bin/casperjs.exe

mv /usr/bin/casperjs /usr/bin/casperjs.1.1.0-beta3

ln -sf `pwd`/bin/casperjs /usr/bin/casperjs

Step 3 — Verify Casper

Running casper, I checked to ensure it’s on the latest version:

casperjs
CasperJS version 1.1.0-beta5 at /opt/casperjs, using phantomjs version 2.1.1

This looks like it’s good to go.. now CASPER AWAY!!

Entrepreneurship, Software Development, Technology

Installing PhantomJS 2.1.1 on AWS (CentOS)

Leave a comment

phantomjs-logoIt’s a gamble to do this, and according to the build script it’s going to take a long time to complete the compile / install of Phantom 2.1.1.

Note: If you are looking for instructions on building for Ubuntu, the steps are different. I’ve documented that process in this post: Installing PhantomJS 2.1.1 on Ubuntu.

Step 1 — install required dependencies

You may or may not have most of these on your AWS / CentOS system. I found that most of these were required to start the PhantomJS build.Here are the ones that I’ve confirmed I needed:

  • autoconf
  • pkgconfig.x86_64
  • python26-pyudev.noarch
  • python26-twisted.noarch
  • sip.x86_64
  • python27-pyudev.noarch
  • python27-twisted.noarch
  • gcc
  • flex
  • bison
  • xorg-x11-server-Xorg.x86_64
  • xorg-x11-server-devel.x86_64
  • xorg-x11-utils.x86_64
  • xorg-x11-proto-devel.noarch
  • sqlite-tcl.x86_64
  • sqlite-devel.x86_64
  • openssl.x86_64
  • crypto-utils.x86_64
  • openssl-devel.x86_64
  • libfontenc.x86_64
  • libfontenc-devel.x86_64
  • fontconfig.x86_64
  • fontconfig-devel.x86_64
  • libicu-devel.x86_64
  • freetype-devel.x86_64
  • libpng-devel.x86_64
  • libjpeg-turbo-devel.x86_64
  • libXext-devel.x86_64
  • libxcb-devel.x86_64
  • xcb-util.x86_64

Installing the packages went smoothly:

sudo yum install autoconf pkgconfig.x86_64 python26-pyudev.noarch python26-twisted.noarch sip.x86_64 python27-pyudev.noarch python27-twisted.noarch gcc flex bison xorg-x11-server-Xorg.x86_64 xorg-x11-server-devel.x86_64 xorg-x11-utils.x86_64 xorg-x11-proto-devel.noarch sqlite-tcl.x86_64 sqlite-devel.x86_64 openssl.x86_64 crypto-utils.x86_64 openssl-devel.x86_64 libfontenc.x86_64 libfontenc-devel.x86_64 fontconfig.x86_64 fontconfig-devel.x86_64 libicu-devel.x86_64 freetype-devel.x86_64 libpng-devel.x86_64 libjpeg-turbo-devel.x86_64 libXext-devel.x86_64 libxcb-devel.x86_64 xcb-util.x86_64

Step 2 — clone the Git repo to local drive:

git clone git://github.com/ariya/phantomjs.git
Cloning into ‘phantomjs’…
remote: Counting objects: 63695, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (37/37), done.
remote: Total 63695 (delta 16), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 63657
Receiving objects: 100% (63695/63695), 129.05 MiB | 4.08 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (31013/31013), done.
Checking connectivity… done.

cd phantomjs

git checkout 2.1.1
Note: checking out ‘2.1.1’.
[…]
HEAD is now at d9cda3d… Set version to “2.1.1”

git submodule init
Submodule ‘3rdparty-win’ (https://github.com/Vitallium/phantomjs-3rdparty-win.git) registered for path ‘src/qt/3rdparty’
Submodule ‘qtbase’ (https://github.com/Vitallium/qtbase.git) registered for path ‘src/qt/qtbase’
Submodule ‘qtwebkit’ (https://github.com/Vitallium/qtwebkit.git) registered for path ‘src/qt/qtwebkit’

git submodule update
Cloning into ‘src/qt/3rdparty’…
Cloning into ‘src/qt/qtbase’…
Cloning into ‘src/qt/qtwebkit’…

Step 3 — Hack the QT build

It seemed that I needed to set some different flags for the qtbase build. It was not clear to me if this could be done with the build.py options, so I hacked the qt/qtbase/configure script.

vi src/qt/qtbase/configure

First off, I changed the settings of these two values near the top of the config file:

Then commented out part of the section around Werror, so that the build would not treat warnings as errors. The C++ macro options in the code will generate A LOT of errors, most of them from the flags defined in build.py. I tried the route of disabling those flags and ended up with more errors and more issues.. so changing the flags in the config was my next option:

[…]
#CFG_WERROR=auto
CFG_WERROR=no
[…]
#CFG_DEV=no
CFG_DEV=yes
[…]
warnings-are-errors|Werror)
# if [ “$VAL” = “yes” ] || [ “$VAL” = “no” ]; then
# CFG_WERROR=”$VAL”
# else
UNKNOWN_OPT=yes
# fi
;;
[…]

Step 4 — Build!

python build.py
—————————————-
WARNING
—————————————-

Building PhantomJS from source takes a very long time, anywhere from 30 minutes
to several hours (depending on the machine configuration). It is recommended to
use the premade binary packages on supported operating systems.

For details, please go the the web site: http://phantomjs.org/download.html.

Do you want to continue (Y/n)? Y

Step 5 — check the binary

Once the build has completed, you will find the binary to be built in the local directory bin/

ls -l bin/phantomjs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 56736434 Feb 5 11:33 /usr/sbin/phantomjs

To complete the installation, you’ll need to replace the current phantomjs binary with the new one. To find the location if your current binary (if you have one), this should work:

whereis phantomjs
phantomjs: /usr/bin/phantomjs

Copy the new binary to that location and verify version:

cp bin/phantomjs /usr/bin/phantomjs
cp: overwrite ‘/usr/bin/phantomjs’? y

phantomjs -v
2.1.1

YOU ARE DONE!! It was just that easy

Software Development, Technology

Installing PhantomJS 2.1.1 on Ubuntu

Leave a comment

phantomjs-logoIt’s a gamble to do this, and according to the build script it’s going to take a long time to complete the compile / install of Phantom 2.1.1.

Note: If you run into build problems with some of the required components, such as the fonts, qtbase, etc., you will want to check my previous post Installing PhantomJS 2 on Ubuntu for some help.

Step 1 — install required dependencies

You may or may not have most of these on your Ubuntu system. I found that most of these were required to start the PhantomJS build.Here are the ones that I’ve confirmed I needed:

  • autoconf2.13

  • pkg-config

  • build-essential

  • qt5-qmake

  • g++

  • python

  • ruby

  • perl

  • sqlite

  • flex

  • bison

  • gperf

  • openssl

  • fontconfig

  • xorg

  • xorg-dev

  • xutils-dev

  • xcb-proto

  • libtool

  • libsqlite0

  • libssl-dev

  • libsqlite3-dev

  • libfontconfig1-dev

  • libicu-dev

  • libfreetype6

  • libssl-dev

  • libpng-dev

  • libpng12-dev

  • libjpeg-dev

  • libx11-dev

  • libxext-dev

  • libxcb-xkb-dev

Installing the packages went smoothly:

sudo apt-get install autoconf2.13 pkg-config build-essential qt5-qmake g++ python ruby perl sqlite flex bison gperf openssl fontconfig xorg xorg-dev xutils-dev xcb-proto libtool libsqlite0 libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev libfontconfig1-dev libicu-dev libfreetype6 libssl-dev libpng-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev libx11-dev libxext-dev libxcb-xkb-dev x11proto-core-dev libxcb-render-util0 libqt5webkit5-dev

Step 2 — clone the Git repo to local drive:

git clone git://github.com/ariya/phantomjs.git
Cloning into ‘phantomjs’…
remote: Counting objects: 63695, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (37/37), done.
remote: Total 63695 (delta 16), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 63657
Receiving objects: 100% (63695/63695), 129.05 MiB | 4.08 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (31013/31013), done.
Checking connectivity… done.

cd phantomjs

git checkout 2.1.1
Note: checking out ‘2.1.1’.
[…]
HEAD is now at d9cda3d… Set version to “2.1.1”

git submodule init
Submodule ‘3rdparty-win’ (https://github.com/Vitallium/phantomjs-3rdparty-win.git) registered for path ‘src/qt/3rdparty’
Submodule ‘qtbase’ (https://github.com/Vitallium/qtbase.git) registered for path ‘src/qt/qtbase’
Submodule ‘qtwebkit’ (https://github.com/Vitallium/qtwebkit.git) registered for path ‘src/qt/qtwebkit’

git submodule update
Cloning into ‘src/qt/3rdparty’…
Cloning into ‘src/qt/qtbase’…
Cloning into ‘src/qt/qtwebkit’…

python build.py
—————————————-
WARNING
—————————————-

Building PhantomJS from source takes a very long time, anywhere from 30 minutes
to several hours (depending on the machine configuration). It is recommended to
use the premade binary packages on supported operating systems.

For details, please go the the web site: http://phantomjs.org/download.html.

Do you want to continue (Y/n)? Y

NOTE: If you want to suppress the warning regarding perils of the long compile, you an use the –confirm flag to bypass the question. This is really helpful if you want to background the process and write it to a log. Where I find this most beneficial is when I want to/need to close the terminal window before the compile completes.

Here is an optional method of running that will background the process, auto-reply to the warning and write to a log file:

nohup ./build.sh –confirm –jobs 1 > build.log &

You might carp about not being able to monitor progress now! Well sure you can.. just do a following tail on the file. Exact command varies with system, I’ll provide the one for typical LINUX and for typical OSX:

For typical LINUX:
tailf build.log

For typical OSX:
tail -f build.log

Step 3 — check the binary

Once the build has completed, you will find the binary to be built in the local directory bin/

ls -l bin/phantomjs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 56736434 Feb 5 11:33 /usr/sbin/phantomjs

To complete the installation, you’ll need to replace the current phantomjs binary with the new one. To find the location if your current binary (if you have one), this should work:

whereis phantomjs
phantomjs: /usr/bin/phantomjs

Copy the new binary to that location and verify version:

cp bin/phantomjs /usr/bin/phantomjs
cp: overwrite ‘/usr/bin/phantomjs’? y

phantomjs -v
2.1.1

YOU ARE DONE!! It was just that easy

Software Development, Technology

Installing CasperJS the compiled way

Leave a comment

Installing CaspeJS from source is always fun, so I’m going to tell you how.

Step 1 – Get the source code

Getting the source code from CasperJS website. As of 16-OCT-2015 when I write this, the following command worked. When a new version is released.. this link might go away.. so.. a little hunting might be needed on your part.

The CaseperJS website is located HERE ( http://casperjs.org/ ).

wget https://github.com/n1k0/casperjs/zipball/1.1-beta3/n1k0-casperjs-1.1-beta3-0-g4f105a9.zip

Step 2 – unpack the files

Unpack the files and prepare for compiling:

unzip n1k0-casperjs-1.1-beta3-0-g4f105a9.zip

Step 2 – build it

Software Development, Technology

Installing PhantomJS 2 on Ubuntu

1 Comment

phantomjs-logoIt’s a gamble to do this, and according to the build script it’s going to take a long time to complete the compile / install of Phantom 2.0.

Step 1 — locate the source, download and unzip:

wget https://bitbucket.org/ariya/phantomjs/downloads/phantomjs-2.0.0-source.zip
Length: 110092872 (105M) [application/zip]
Saving to: ‘phantomjs-2.0.0-source.zip’

unzip phantomjs-2.0.0-source.zip
Archive: phantomjs-2.0.0-source.zip
a2912c216d06df4d8b51f12ad4082a48c5fc7ba6
creating: phantomjs-2.0.0/
inflating: phantomjs-2.0.0/.gitignore
[…]
inflating: phantomjs-2.0.0/tools/preconfig.sh
inflating: phantomjs-2.0.0/tools/qscriptengine.h
inflating: phantomjs-2.0.0/tools/src.pro

Step 2 — install required dependencies

You may or may not have most of these on your Ubuntu system. I found that most of these were required to start the PhantomJS build.Here are the ones that I’ve confirmed I needed:

  • autoconf2.13
  • ruby
  • pkg-config
  • libicu-dev
  • gperf
  • bison
  • libjpeg-dev
  • g++
  • openssl
  • libtool
  • libssl-dev
  • libpng-dev
  • libpng12-dev
  • libjpeg-dev
  • fontconfig
  • sqlite
  • fontconfig
  • libsqlite0
  • qt5-qmake
  • xorg
  • xorg-dev
  • xutils-dev
  • xcb-proto
  • libxcb-xkb-dev
  • x11proto-core-dev
  • libxcb-render-util0
  • libqt5webkit5-dev

Installing the packages went smoothly:

apt-get install autoconf2.13 ruby pkg-config libicu-dev gperf bison libjpeg-dev g++ openssl libtool libssl-dev libpng-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev fontconfig sqlite fontconfig libsqlite0 qt5-qmake xorg xorg-dev xutils-dev xcb-proto libxcb-xkb-dev x11proto-core-dev libxcb-render-util0 libqt5webkit5-dev

Step 3 — Build Freetype from source and link

Following this I grabbed the source code to install freetype2. Although freetype successfully installed, the required header files where not found. I decided it was bet to grab it and build from source:

wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.6.tar.gz
gunzip freetype-2.6.tar.gz
tar xvf freetype-2.6.tar
./configure
[…]
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating unix-cc.mk
config.status: creating unix-def.mk
config.status: creating ftconfig.h
config.status: executing libtool commands
configure:
make & make install
[…]
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./builds/unix/ftconfig.h \
/usr/local/include/freetype2/config/ftconfig.h
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 /usr/local/freetype-2.6/objs/ftmodule.h \
/usr/local/include/freetype2/config/ftmodule.h
/usr/bin/install -c -m 755 ./builds/unix/freetype-config \
/usr/local/bin/freetype-config
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./builds/unix/freetype2.m4 \
/usr/local/share/aclocal/freetype2.m4
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./builds/unix/freetype2.pc \
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/freetype2.pc
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 /usr/local/freetype-2.6/docs/freetype-config.1 \
/usr/local/share/man/man1/freetype-config.1

Now following that build, due to some inexplicable continuous oversight on the part of freetype’s maintainers.. OR.. phantom.. a link has to be make so that the build process can find the actual libraries required:

ln -s /usr/include/freetype2/freetype /usr/include/freetype

Step 4 — Install an updated version of libxkbcommon

Get the latest version.. and build it:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/libxkbcommon_0.5.0.orig.tar.gz
gunzip libxkbcommon_0.5.0.orig.tar.gz
tar xvf libxkbcommon_0.5.0.orig.tar
cd libxkbcommon-0.5.0
./autogen.sh
./configure

Step 5 — hack QtBase

After many times running thorough the process and resolving errors.. I decided to manually build QTBase. To do this I moved to the source directory for it under PhantomJS, and used this configuration command to get past a libxcb error:

cd src/qt/qtbase
./configure -developer-build -opensource -nomake examples -nomake tests -qt-xcb
./configure -opensource
make
make install

Step 6 — build

Now bulid.sh script. NOTE: if you are executing the compile on a VM (or in this case AWS), it’s recommended that the build process Does Not try to run parallel build jobs on the virtual cores. The PhantomJS website was not clear (to me) why.. but it did recommend using the –jobs 1 flag on the build.. which I am doing. You may omit that if you’d like to experiment.

cd phantomjs-2.0.0

./build.sh –jobs 1
—————————————-
WARNING
—————————————-

Building PhantomJS from source takes a very long time, anywhere from 30
minutes to several hours (depending on the machine configuration).
We recommend you use the premade binary packages on supported operating
systems.

For details, please go the the web site: http://phantomjs.org/download.html.

Do you want to continue (y/n)?
y
[…]

NOTE: If you want to suppress the warning regarding perils of the long compile, you an use the –confirm flag to bypass the question. This is really helpful if you want to background the process and write it to a log. Where I find this most beneficial is when I want to/need to close the terminal window before the compile completes.

Here is an optional method of running that will background the process, auto-reply to the warning and write to a log file:

nohup ./build.sh –confirm –jobs 1 > build.log &

You might carp about not being able to monitor progress now! Well sure you can.. just do a following tail on the file. Exact command varies with system, I’ll provide the one for typical LINUX and for typical OSX:

For typical LINUX:
tailf build.log

For typical OSX:
tail -f build.log

Step 7 — check the binary

Once the build has completed, you will find the binary to be built in the local directory bin/

ls -l bin/phantomjs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 56587060 Sep 30 17:16 bin/phantomjs

To complete the installation, you’ll need to replace the current phantomjs binary with the new one. To find the location if your current binary (if you have one), this should work:

whereis phantomjs
phantomjs: /usr/bin/phantomjs

Copy the new binary to that location and verify version:

cp bin/phantomjs /usr/bin/phantomjs
cp: overwrite ‘/usr/bin/phantomjs’? y

phantomjs -v
2.0.0

YOU ARE DONE!! It was just that easy

Software Development

Helping CasperJS 1.1.0-beta3 play nice with PhantomJS 2.0.0

1 Comment

As of today, 30-SEP-2015, the latest build for CasperJS 1.1.0-beta3. Not exactly comforting for production use, but it is the most recent and decently capable version available outside of a pull request. So.. let’s get started:

First, I checked the current version of

[root@ip-10-153-205-78 ~]# casperjs –version
1.1.0-beta3
Unsafe JavaScript attempt to access frame with URL about:blank from frame with URL file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/casperjs/bin/bootstrap.js. Domains, protocols and ports must match.

NOTE:You may notice that simply running casper causes PhantomJS to hurl out worthless warning messages. This is the very reason I’m undergoing this exercise.

Next, I dropped the new binary on target server and verified that I am dealing with pJS 2.0, and it’s functioning:

[root@ip-10-153-205-78 ~]# phantomjs -v
2.0.0

Next step is to get to the meat of the errors.

The first I encountered was this:

[root@ip-10-153-205-78 ~]# casperjs –version
CasperJS needs PhantomJS v1.x

/usr/local/lib/node_modules/casperjs/bin/bootstrap.js:91 in __die

Opening this file, around line 91 the following is found:

function __die(message) {
if (message) {
console.error(message);
}
phantom.exit(1);

Tracing back to the caller, the test is performed here:

(function(version) {
// required version check
if (version.major !== 1) {
return __die(‘CasperJS needs PhantomJS v1.x’);
} if (version.minor < 8) { return __die('CasperJS needs at least PhantomJS v1.8 or later.'); } if (version.minor === 8 && version.patch < 1) { return __die('CasperJS needs at least PhantomJS v1.8.1 or later.'); } })(phantom.version);

Next I tried to make it accept version 2, by changing that block to this:

(function(version) {
if (version.major == 1) {
if (version.minor < 8) { return __die('CasperJS needs at least PhantomJS v1.8 or later.'); } if (version.minor === 8 && version.patch < 1) { return __die('CasperJS needs at least PhantomJS v1.8.1 or later.'); } } if (version.major < 2) { return __die('CasperJS needs PhantomJS v1.x or v2.x'); } })(phantom.version);

Next error message was this:

[root@ip-10-153-205-78 ~]# casperjs –version
Couldn’t find nor compute phantom.casperPath, exiting.

/usr/local/lib/node_modules/casperjs/bin/bootstrap.js:91 in __die

It’s origin was in this block:

// CasperJS root path
if (!phantom.casperPath) {
try {
phantom.casperPath = phantom.args.map(function _map(arg) {
var match = arg.match(/^–casper-path=(.*)/);
if (match) {
return fs.absolute(match[1]);
}
}).filter(function _filter(path) {
return fs.isDirectory(path);
}).pop();
} catch (e) {
return __die(“Couldn’t find nor compute phantom.casperPath, exiting.”);
}
}

Based upon information found in this post.. Latest pull of casperjs not working with latest pull of phantomjs2 I made the following modifications:

Paste this section of code in above the first non-comment section in bootstrap file:

// Mods to get Casper and PhantomJS playing nice
var system = require(‘system’);
var argsdeprecated = system.args;
argsdeprecated.shift();
phantom.args = argsdeprecated;

Once you have done that, you should be able to use Casper 1.1.0-beta3 with PhantomJS 2.0 (and look.. NO MORE LAME WARNINGS!!!)

[root@ip-10-153-205-78 ~]# casperjs –version
1.1.0-beta3

Software Development, Technology

Upgrade PhantomJS 1.9 to 2.0 on AWS

Leave a comment

phantomjs-logoIt’s a gamble to do this, and according to the build script it’s going to take a long time to complete, but to try and solve some issues that PhantomJS has with CasperJS 1.1-beta3 (latest version) I wanted to upgrade to Phantom 2.0.

A lot of things have changed, and it’s been suggested that a number of features that CasperJS wants to use, are deprecated in the 2.0 version of Phantom. But forward I’ll forge regardless.

Step 1 is to locate the source, download and unzip:

wget https://bitbucket.org/ariya/phantomjs/downloads/phantomjs-2.0.0-source.zip
Length: 110092872 (105M) [application/zip]
Saving to: ‘phantomjs-2.0.0-source.zip’

unzip phantomjs-2.0.0-source.zip
Archive: phantomjs-2.0.0-source.zip
a2912c216d06df4d8b51f12ad4082a48c5fc7ba6
creating: phantomjs-2.0.0/
inflating: phantomjs-2.0.0/.gitignore
[…]
inflating: phantomjs-2.0.0/tools/preconfig.sh
inflating: phantomjs-2.0.0/tools/qscriptengine.h
inflating: phantomjs-2.0.0/tools/src.pro

Step 2 – install required dependancies

You may or may not have most of these from your previous PhantomJS 1.9.x install, but I found that most of these were required to start the PhantomJS build.Here are the ones that I’ve confirmed I needed:

  • gcc
  • gcc-c++
  • make
  • flex
  • ruby
  • openssl-devel
  • fontconfig-devel
  • sqlite-devel
  • libicu-devel
  • libpng-devel
  • libjpeg-devel
  • freetype-devel
  • bison
  • gperf

Installing the packages went smoothly:

sudo yum -y install gcc gcc-c++ make flex bison gperf ruby openssl-devel freetype-devel fontconfig-devel libicu-devel sqlite-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-devel

Following this I grabbed the source code to install freetype2. Although freetype successfully installed, the required header files where not found. I decided it was bet to grab it and build from source:

wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.6.tar.gz
gunzip freetype-2.6.tar.gz
tar xvf freetype-2.6.tar
./configure
[…]
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating unix-cc.mk
config.status: creating unix-def.mk
config.status: creating ftconfig.h
config.status: executing libtool commands
configure:
make & make install
[…]
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./builds/unix/ftconfig.h \
/usr/local/include/freetype2/config/ftconfig.h
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 /usr/local/freetype-2.6/objs/ftmodule.h \
/usr/local/include/freetype2/config/ftmodule.h
/usr/bin/install -c -m 755 ./builds/unix/freetype-config \
/usr/local/bin/freetype-config
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./builds/unix/freetype2.m4 \
/usr/local/share/aclocal/freetype2.m4
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./builds/unix/freetype2.pc \
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/freetype2.pc
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 /usr/local/freetype-2.6/docs/freetype-config.1 \
/usr/local/share/man/man1/freetype-config.1

Now following that build, due to some inexplicable continuous oversight on the part of freetype’s maintainers.. OR.. phantom.. a link has to be make so that the build process can find the actual libraries required:

ln -s /usr/include/freetype2/freetype /usr/include/freetype

Step 3 – build

Now bulid.sh script. NOTE: if you are executing the compile on a VM (or in this case AWS), it’s recommended that the build process Does Not try to run parallel build jobs on the virtual cores. The PhantomJS website was not clear (to me) why.. but it did recommend using the –jobs 1 flag on the build.. which I am doing. You may omit that if you’d like to experiment.

cd phantomjs-2.0.0

./build.sh –jobs 1
—————————————-
WARNING
—————————————-

Building PhantomJS from source takes a very long time, anywhere from 30
minutes to several hours (depending on the machine configuration).
We recommend you use the premade binary packages on supported operating
systems.

For details, please go the the web site: http://phantomjs.org/download.html.

Do you want to continue (y/n)?
y
[…]

NOTE: If you want to suppress the warning regarding perils of the long compile, you an use the –confirm flag to bypass the question. This is really helpful if you want to background the process and write it to a log. Where I find this most beneficial is when I want to/need to close the terminal window before the compile completes.

Here is an optional method of running that will background the process, auto-reply to the warning and write to a log file:

nohup ./build.sh –confirm –jobs 1 > build.log &

You might carp about not being able to monitor progress now! Well sure you can.. just do a following tail on the file. Exact command varies with system, I’ll provide the one for typical LINUX and for typical OSX:

For typical LINUX:
tailf build.log

For typical OSX:
tail -f build.log

Step 4 – check the binary

Once the build has completed, you will find the binary to be built in the local directory bin/

ls -l bin/phantomjs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 56587060 Sep 30 17:16 bin/phantomjs

To complete the installation, you’ll need to replace the current phantomjs binary with the new one. To find the location if your current binary (if you have one), this should work:

whereis phantomjs
phantomjs: /usr/bin/phantomjs

Copy the new binary to that location and verify version:

cp bin/phantomjs /usr/bin/phantomjs
cp: overwrite ‘/usr/bin/phantomjs’? y

phantomjs -v
2.0.0

YOU ARE DONE!! It was just that easy