Vinyl Phantomic

Forked from mantoni's wonderful phantomic module.

• Pipes vinyl streams to PhantomJS
• Accept .js and .html files. css and custom file handlers forthcoming.
• Writes script console output to stdout
• Writes script errors to stderr
• Exit code 0 if nothing threw, otherwise 1

Probably not working right now

• The command-line API

Todo

• Bring back sourcemap support!
• Better client configuration options.
• Faster loading by caching phantomjs instances and refreshing the page, only create a new instance if it crashes.
• Custom file type handlers:
  • Possible actions will include concat in page, execute script, serve a file, and control Phantom directly.
  • Use predicate functions/streams (not just file extensions) to decide which action to take on a file.
• Continuous file loading - right now, vinyl-phantomic doesn't load anything until the input stream closes.
  • Possibly serve each vinyl file individually and load it into the page.
  • Insert html code into the document, serve script and css files with <script> and <css> tags.
  • Loading shiz via websockets?
• Run tests on other browsers, not just Phantom.
  • Actual browsers, including Chrome, Safari, and IE.
  • Zombie.js
  • Casper.js (navigation and scripting for phantomjs.) This will be very useful when you can stream commands to Phantom.
• Update some of the code and modules so it's more concise and up-to-date.
• Write some tests showing different uses of vinyl-phantomic, e.g.
  • Gulp tests
  • Browserify
  • Different testing frameworks
• Fix and test the command line API. I don't use it so I have been neglecting it... shame on me. ;_;
• Make vinyl-phantomic be more gulp-plugin-y: https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp/blob/master/docs/writing-a-plugin/README.md
• More robust handling of when to exit a phantom stream. Right now it has lots of timers... I don't think there is an obvious, better solution.

Pull requests welcome!

Install

npm install vinyl-phantomic

Usage

Vinyl-Phantomic includes PhantomJS as a dependency. On windows I still had to include a copy of phantomjs.exe in the directory I was running the node script from.

Exit detection

By default, phantomic will report an error if anything was logged to console.error. Program termination is detected by observing delays in the event queue and the last log statement that was received.

To make exit detection more reliable, brout can be used. If brout is part of the given script, run phantomic with --brout to install handlers for the out, err and exit events. Also make sure process.exit(code) is called.

API

You can use phantomic from your own node scripts like this:

var phantom = require('vinyl-phantomic');
var gulp = require('gulp');

// Take streams of html, css, and JS files:
gulp.src([
  'tests/*.js',
  'tests/*.html'
])

// pipe them to vinyl-phantomic
.pipe(phantom({
  debug : false,
  port  : 8080,
  brout : false
}, function (code) {
  // callback when complete
  // FIXME: this should probably just be the stream end, not a seperate callback.
  process.exit(code);
})

// and watch the errors fly!
.pipe(process.stdout);

Run the test cases

$ npm install
$ gulp test

Compatibility

• Node 0.10 or later
• PhantomJS 1.9

License

MIT