Last week I needed to automate an internet lookup in real time which required a several step login process (no API available). I was having trouble getting it to work with Curl. I had heard good things about CasperJS and PhantomJS so I figured I would try it out. I decided to use my own bluehost vps server to start with because it is always easier to develop a program which you have full control over.

CasperJS logo

I started with PhantomJS by itself, because I figured if I could get that working I didn’t need casper. However, after attempting the follow the installation instructions and using Phantom directly, I was getting errors that the client class was not found. I tried manually including the class file but that just led to more and more missing class and object errors because the whole library is setup to autoload things. After manually including the vendor/autoload.php file I at least didn’t get any more errors, but the simple examples were giving me responses of 0 so I decided I needed a different approach.

Installing CasperJS was relatively easy, but let me share the steps I followed to actually get phantom installed (it could be there is something I missed which prevented it from working by itself, but since I got casper working later I was satisfied):

  1. Login to the server through SSH (I use putty for this) as root (this is needed later. If you have a non privileged user who can login through ssh then you can start with that. Or if you’ve disabled root logins then login with the user who can become root)
  2. Become a non privileged user (type ‘sudo su [username]’, where username is the owner of your existing web files – the specific user here is important to avoid permission errors later).
  3. Create a directory for casper and phantom, like automation or browsercontrol, in a directory above an existing domain or subdomain so it’s not accessible in a browser (for security reasons)
  4. CD to the new directory and install composer there (even if composer is already a recognized command, do this anyway): curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php
  5. Create a file in that directory called composer.json with these contents (this is straight from the installation guide):
    {
            "require": {
                "jonnyw/php-phantomjs": "4.*"
            },
            "config": {
                "bin-dir": "bin"
            },
            "scripts": {
                "post-install-cmd": [
                    "PhantomInstaller\\Installer::installPhantomJS"
                ],
                "post-update-cmd": [
                    "PhantomInstaller\\Installer::installPhantomJS"
                ]
            }
        }
    
  6. Try this command to install phantomjs:
    php composer.phar install
    
  7. If that doesn’t work (for example there is no bin folder created, and/or phantomjs is not created anywhere locally), then go to http://phantomjs.org/download.html and pick a link to manually download to your server (in your new folder, for example this is the command I used from my new directory):
    wget https://bitbucket.org/ariya/phantomjs/downloads/phantomjs-2.1.1-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
    
  8. Extract the downloaded file (x means extract, j means it’s a bz2 file, and f means the file name is coming next):
    tar xjf phantomjs-2.1.1-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
    
  9. Use this command to figure out what folders are currently in your path:
    echo $PATH
    
  10. Pick one like /usr/bin which is not for system programs (/bin and /sbin are, so don’t use those to avoid confusion later)
  11. Figure out the absolute path to phantomjs in your system now by finding it and then using pwd to get the path (likely ending with something like phantomjs-2.1.1-linux-x86_64/bin/phantomjs)
  12. Become root (if you logged in as root you can be root again by typing ‘exit’ at the prompt)
  13. Create a symbolic link to phantomjs inside the folder you picked in step 10 (like /usr/bin). Something like this:
    ln -sf /full/path/to/phantomjs /usr/bin/phantomjs
    
  14. Validate it worked by becoming the non-privileged user again and typing “phantomjs –version”. You should see a version number, not a complaint about no command found

Then for CasperJS:

  • Use slightly modified instructions from casperjs.org to install casper from git and put a link to it into your path (as the non privileged user, starting in the new folder you created):
    git clone git://github.com/casperjs/casperjs.git
    cd casperjs
    ln -sf `pwd`/bin/casperjs /usr/bin/casperjs
    

    If you picked a different folder in step 10, use it in the second part of the third command instead of /usr/bin.

  • Validate casper install by typing casperjs from the command line from any folder. You should see info about casperjs, not a complaint about a missing command.
  • In order to use casper within a PHP file, you will need to use the exec command (make sure that is allowed in your php.ini file). Here is a test php file you can use to make sure it is setup fully:

    if(function_exists('exec')) {
    	echo "exec is enabled<br>";
    } else echo "exec is not enabled<br>";
    exec("phantomjs --version", $outArr1);
    exec("casperjs", $outArr2);
    echo "<br>PhantomJS version output:<br>";
    print_r($outArr1);
    echo "<br>CasperJS output:<br>";
    print_r($outArr2);
    

    If you see a version number like 2.1.1 for phantom and a bunch of info about casper (after the CasperJS output line) you are good to go. The next step is to follow the casper instructions to create your javascript logic and then change your casper exec command to be something like this:

    exec("casperjs casperLogic.js --getParam1=\"This is passed to the script\" --getParam2=\"This is also passed to the script\"", $outArr);
    

    Happy automating!

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