Headless Testing

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 test frameworks have built-in support for PhantomJS.

• Buster.JS
• FuncUnit
• Hiro
• QUnit
• Testacular

For other test frameworks, various test runners/drivers are usually available:

• Capybara: Poltergeist
• Mocha: mocha-phantomjs
• Jasmine: Chutzpah, grunt-jasmine-runner, guard-jasmine, phantom-jasmine
• JsTestDriver: js-test-driver-phantomjs
• Robot Framework: phantomrobot
• QUnit: Chutzpah, JS Test Runner, United
• WebDriver: GhostDriver
• 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.