Quick Start

This instruction assumes that PhantomJS is installed and its executable is place somewhere in the PATH.

All of the examples given here are available in the code repository under the sub-directory examples/. For each example, there are two version for each JavaScript and CoffeeScript.

Hello, World!

Create a new text file that contains the following two lines:

console.log('Hello, world!');
phantom.exit();

Save it as hello.js and the run it:

phantomjs hello.js

The output is:

Hello, world!

In the first line, console.log will print the passed string to the terminal. In the second line, phantom.exit terminates the execution.

It is very important to call phantom.exit at some point in the script, otherwise PhantomJS will not be terminated at all.

Page Loading

A web page can be loaded, analyzed, and rendered by creating a web page object.

The following script demonstrates the simplest use of page object. It loads Google homepage and then save it as an image, google.png.

var page = require('webpage').create();
page.open('http://google.com', function () {
    page.render('google.png');
    phantom.exit();
});

Because of its rendering features, PhantomJS can be used to capture web pages, essentially taking a screenshot of the contents.

The following loadspeed.js script loads a specified URL (do not forget the http protocol) and measures the time it takes to load it.

var page = require('webpage').create(),
    t, address;

if (phantom.args.length === 0) {
    console.log('Usage: loadspeed.js <some URL>');
    phantom.exit();
} else {
    t = Date.now();
    address = phantom.args[0];
    page.open(address, function (status) {
        if (status !== 'success') {
            console.log('FAIL to load the address');
        } else {
            t = Date.now() - t;
            console.log('Loading time ' + t + ' msec');
        }
        phantom.exit();
    });
}

Run the script with the command:

phantomjs loadspeed.js http://www.google.com

It outputs something like:

Loading http://www.google.com Loading time 719 msec

(More to be written)

Script Arguments

(To be written)

Page Settings

(To be written)

Code Evaluation

(To be written)

Canvas

(To be written)