A GUI to debug phantomjs script

Question

I am using phantomjs to build a web crawler. My current crawler is a Python script using selenium, which requires a running Firefox browser. While Selenium is good for debugging scripts (as I can use firebug to inspect the webpage), it cannot be deployed on linux servers without GUI. So I am trying to translate my Python script to phantomjs.

To debug phantomjs scripts, I save the page source html and render a png screenshot to disk, and open it in Firefox to inspect the source page. I am wondering if there is a better way to do this, e.g. a plugin for phantomjs, etc.

Answer 1

This little hack is using a simple technique: It grabs the screen as PhantomJS or CasperJS sees it with captureBase64('png') and then it is POSTing the image into the receiving server which then sends it via socket.io to the browser which displays it is as inline image.

The source code is available on github:

https://github.com/maciejjankowski/flaming-octo-puss

I'm not sure if PhantomJS has it, but CasperJS does (and the latter adds some extra functions to PhantomJS)

and use remote debugging as others suggest