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Headless Testing

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fmanaya edited this page Oct 1, 2012 · 34 revisions

One major use case of PhantomJS is headless testing of web applications. It is suitable for general command-line based testing, within a precommit hook, and as part as a continuous integration system.

Test Frameworks

PhantomJS itself is not a test framework, it is only used to launch the tests via a suitable test runner.

The following table summarizes the list of various test frameworks and the corresponding test runners. If the framework does not need an external/third-party runner, it is marked as "built-in".

Framework Test Runner
Buster.JS built-in
Capybara Poltergeist
Mocha mocha-phantomjs
FuncUnit built-in
Hiro built-in
Jasmine Chutzpah, grunt-jasmine-runner, guard-jasmine, phantom-jasmine
JsTestDriver js-test-driver-phantomjs
Robot Framework phantomrobot
QUnit built-in, Chutzpah, JS Test Runner, United
Testacular built-in
Testem built-in
WebDriver GhostDriver
wru built-in
YUITest Grover, phantomjs-yuitest

In addition, there are projects which are built on top of PhantomJS to provide convenient high-level functionality for testing purposes:

  • Casper.js is useful to build scripted navigation and testing
  • Lotte adds jQuery-like methods, chaining, and more assertion logic
  • WebSpecter is a BDD-style acceptance test framework for web applications

PhantomJS includes run-qunit and run-jasmine in its examples subdirectory. However, these are for illustration purposes, it lacks important reporting features necessary for real-world uses.

Continuous Integration Systems

Using PhantomJS with CI system such as Jenkins or TeamCity does not require special setup. Make sure PhantomJS is installed properly on the slave/build agent and it is ready to go.

Since PhantomJS is purely headless on Linux, the agent can run on an installation with any GUI. This means, a barebone Linux system without X11 is not a problem for PhantomJS. It makes it possible to spawn light build agents on Amazon EC2 or Heroku instances.

Travis CI, a popular hosted CI system, has built-in support for PhantomJS. See its documentation for details.

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