How to pass browser parameter to Watir

Question

I am using Ruby and am using the latest gem version of Watir. I plan to use headless browser such as PhantomJS. How can one pass paramater to the Phantom JS browser when it get executed.

My purpose is so that Phantom JS do not need to load images.

Answer 1

As described on the PhantomJS command line page, there is an option to control the loading of images:

--load-images=[true|false] load all inlined images (default is true). Also accepted: [yes|no].

During the initialization of a Watir::Browser, these settings can be specified, as an array, in the :args key. For example:

args = %w{--load-images=false}
browser = Watir::Browser.new(:phantomjs, :args => args)

A working example:

require 'watir-webdriver'

# Capture screenshot with --load-images=true
browser = Watir::Browser.new(:phantomjs)
browser.goto 'https://www.google.com'
browser.screenshot.save('phantomjs_with_images.png')

# Capture screenshot with --load-images=false
args = %w{--load-images=false}
browser = Watir::Browser.new(:phantomjs, :args => args)
browser.goto 'https://www.google.com'
browser.screenshot.save('phantomjs_without_images.png')

Which gives the screenshot with images loaded:

And the screenshot without images loaded:

Notice that the Google image of the page is not loaded in the second screenshot (as expected since load-images was set to false).