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: grunt-jasmine-runner, guard-jasmine, phantom-jasmine
• Robot Framework: phantomrobot
• 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

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.