How to properly stop phantomjs execution

Question

I initiated and close phantomjs in Python with the following

from selenium import webdriver     driver = webdriver.PhantomJS() driver.get(url) html_doc = driver.page_source driver.close() 

yet after the script ends execution I still find an instance of phantomjs in my Mac Activity Monitor. And actually every time I run the script a new process phantomjs is created.

How should I close the driver?

Answer 1

As of July 2016, driver.close() and driver.quit() weren't sufficient for me. That killed the node process but not the phantomjs child process it spawned.

Following the discussion on this GitHub issue, the single solution that worked for me was to run:

import signal  driver.service.process.send_signal(signal.SIGTERM) # kill the specific phantomjs child proc driver.quit()                                      # quit the node proc 

Answer 2

Please note that this will obviously cause trouble if you have several threads/processes starting PhantomJS on your machine.

I've seen several people struggle with the same issue, but for me, the simplest workaround/hack was to execute the following from the command line through Python AFTER you have invoked driver.close() or driver.quit():

pgrep phantomjs | xargs kill