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Using a command line argument for PhantomJS and the Selenium Server Standalone

· phantomjs binary path phantomjs.binary.path selenium server standalone selenium server standalone 2.35.0 ie chrome driver automation browser testing qa software webdriver me writing self perl webdriver tutorial

tl; dr - -Dphantomjs.binary.path=/path/to/your/phantomjs

Selenium WebDriver is a browser automation framework that uses "drivers" to drive browsers. So, there is a "chromedriver" that you send instructions like "click on the Sign In link" or "tell me what color that element is," and it will carry out the instructions in an actual Chrome browser. PhantomJS, by Ariya Hidayat, is a quick, lightweight headless browser that parses JS (unlike HTMLUnit! !). Since it doesn't have to render anything on the screen, it can perform these tests much faster, but the tradeoff is accuracy - you're no longer testing in the exact same environment as your users.

Its driver is cleverly (?) named GhostDriver, written by Ivan De Marino. GhostDriver is built-in to PhantomJS, so if you want to use PhantomJS in your WebDriver tests, the only thing you need to do is install PhantomJS, which Ariya makes very easy (for example, brew install phantomjs).

I'm using the Perl WebDriver bindings, and I start the selenium server with a shell command that looks something like

C:\> java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.35.0.jar ^
    -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=C:\chromedriver.exe ^
    -Dwebdriver.ie.driver=C:\InternetExplorerDriver.exe

That -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver option tells the Selenium server where to go find my Chromedriver, and likewise for IE. Now, PhantomJS makes it really easy to connect to an existing standalone server - from their Github page, once PhantomJS is in your path, you just need to

$ phantomjs --webdriver=<PORT_TO_WEBDRIVER> # default is 4444

So, those two commands will start up the Selenium standalone server and hook up PhantomJS to it, so you can request a PhantomJS browser of the server and run your tests. But, it's a pain to have to set up two processes for PhantomJS when I can already add the Chrome and IE drivers as options. I couldn't find this documented anywhere, but you can also add the PhantomJS binary as a command line argument to the standalone server:

$ java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.35.0.jar \
    -Dphantomjs.binary.path=/path/to/your/phantomjs

If you use homebrew, it would be

$ java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.35.0.jar \
    -Dphantomjs.binary.path=/usr/local/bin/phantomjs