Installing CasperJS on Windows: How to do it correctly?

Question

I know there is a documentation from CasperJS website about how to install CasperJS on Windows, but bear with me these guys only explained for the pros only.

If you

Answer 1

after a 3days work, i managed to get it work the problem was with the path and the installation of phantom. i had made the path to a folder but the installation was pointing to the exe file all i had to do was to put the exe file into a folder phantomjs and that was it thank for your help all.

Answer 2

Fast forward to 2015... 5-steps win7 howto:

1. choco: PS me> iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
2. git: choco install git -y
3. phantomjs 2.0: choco install phantomjs -y
4. casperjs source: git clone https://github.com/n1k0/casperjs -b phantomjs-2
5. Add the location of casperjs/bin to PATH

Done. You can now casperjs --version and live happily ever after.

Answer 3

Ok guys. So I think this thread needs refreshing for 2018!

So with npm, the effort is reduced significantly. Given that you have npm installed, open terminal and go to your project:

cd your_project_name

Now install casperjs. Use --save-dev, --save, -g or none as needed:

npm install --save-dev casperjs

Now install phantomjs. To do this, you should install phantomjs-prebuilt, because PhantomJS team changed their package name:

npm install --save-dev phantomjs-prebuilt

Run your spec:

casperjs your_spec_name.js

Answer 4

As of CasperJS 1.1.0-DEV Beta 3 you should use this PATH: C:\casperjs\batchbin even though the documentation found here states you need to use C:\casperjs\bin

The reason to this is because C:\casperjs\batchbin includes a .BAT which C:\casperjs\bin does not include anything except some.js files.

Answer 5

Just in case you're using a notebook with dual graphic cards like I do: choose one of them to prevent issues. This article helped me out:

casperJS not finishing on windows

the casperJS documentation is pretty clear about it but I had no clue what to do until I read the notice above.

Answer 6

I itemize below the method that has served my needs on both my personal Windows and Ubuntu work PC. DO note that my method doesn't fiddle with PATH settings but involves a command you could save somewhere & copy and paste as needed:

Step 1: Gather the prerequisites

• Download the casperjs and phantomjs versions you want to use
• Make a directory to contain the things I want to list
• Extract the downloaded phantomjs & copy its executable into the directory of step b
• Extract casperjs and rename its folder to casperjs
• Copy the renamed casperjs folder to the directory of step b
• Create and save a file config.json to the directory of step b
• config.json should contain phantomjs configurations as found here: http://phantomjs.org/api/command-line.html

Step 2: Running your script

• Whenever you want to work with a file, follow the Step 1 details above
• The next step assumes that you are in the directory created in step b of Step 1 also have a file named first.js
• On Windows: phantomjs.exe --config=config.json casperjs/bin/bootstrap.js --casper-path=casperjs --cli first.js
• On Ubuntu: ./phantomjs --config=config.json casperjs/bin/bootstrap.js --casper-path=casperjs --cli first.js

Experimental config.js and first.js are listed below:

config.json

{"sslProtocol": "any", "cookiesFile": "biscuit", "maxDiskCacheSize": 1000, "diskCache": true}

first.js

var casper = require('casper').create({
    pageSettings: {
        loadImages: false,
        loadPlugins: true,
        userAgent: 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; nl; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 Firefox/3.5.6'
    }
});
var url = "http://casperjs.org/";

casper.start(url).wait(60 * 1000 * 1, function() {
     casper.echo('1 min has passed');
     casper.capture('casperjs.png');
     casper.exit();
});

casper.run();

Addendum: download and save the details of screenshots.js and run it as

phantomjs.exe --config=config.json casperjs/bin/bootstrap.js --casper-path=casperjs --cli screenshots.js http://phantomjs.org

Run Tests: download & save the details of picturefill-test.js and run it as

phantomjs.exe --config=config.json casperjs/bin/bootstrap.js --casper-path=casperjs test --cli picturefill-test.js