Ghost Driver is a pure JavaScript implementation of the WebDriver Wire Protocol for PhantomJS. It's a Remote WebDriver that uses PhantomJS as back-end.
GhostDriver is designed to be integral part of PhantomJS itself, but it's developed in isolation and progress is tracked by this Repository.
- Current GhostDriver stable version: see releases
- Current PhantomJS-integrated version is
"1.1.0"
: contained in PhantomJS"1.9.7"
- Current PhantomJSDriver Java bindings stable version: see Maven
For more info, please take a look at the changelog.
The project was created and is lead by Ivan De Marino.
IRC channel: #phantomjs-ghostdriver.
- Download latest stable PhantomJS from here
- Selenium version
">= 2.33.0
"
THAT'S IT!! Because of latest stable GhostDriver being embedded in PhantomJS, you shouldn't need anything else to get started.
- Launch the grid server, which listens on 4444 by default:
java -jar /path/to/selenium-server-standalone-<SELENIUM VERSION>.jar -role hub
- Register with the hub:
phantomjs --webdriver=8080 --webdriver-selenium-grid-hub=http://127.0.0.1:4444
- Now you can use your normal webdriver client with
http://127.0.0.1:4444
and just requestbrowserName: phantomjs
This project provides WebDriver bindings for Java under the name PhantomJSDriver. Here is the JavaDoc.
Bindings for other languages (C#, Python, Ruby, ...) are developed and maintained under the same name within the Selenium project itself.
Just add the following to your pom.xml
:
<dependency>
<groupId>com.github.detro.ghostdriver</groupId>
<artifactId>phantomjsdriver</artifactId>
<version>LATEST_VERSION_HERE</version>
</dependency>
Just add the following to your build.gradle
:
dependencies {
...
testCompile "com.github.detro.ghostdriver:phantomjsdriver:LATEST_VERSION_HERE"
...
}
For other options on how to include the PhantomJSDriver dependency into your project, click here.
Launching PhantomJS in Remote WebDriver mode it's simple:
$ phantomjs --webdriver=PORT
Once started, you can use any RemoteWebDriver
implementation to send commands to it. I advice to take a look to the
/test
directory for examples.
- GhostDriver extra Capabilities
- PhantomJSDriver (Java-binding) Capabilities
phantomjs.binary.path
- Specify path to PhantomJS executable to usephantomjs.ghostdriver.path
- Specify path to GhostDrivermain/src.js
script to use; allows to use a different version of GhostDriver then the one embed in PhantomJSphantomjs.cli.args
- Specify command line arguments to pass to the PhantomJS executablephantomjs.ghostdriver.cli.args
- Specify command line argument to pass to GhostDriver (works only in tandem withphantomjs.ghostdriver.path
)
GhostDriver pushed the evolution of PhantomJS from the start. All the features required by PhantomJS to fit GhostDriver were designed to still feel "consistent" and "at home" with PhantomJS alone.
To drive that effort, I worked on a PhantomJS fork, and then pushed changes to PhantomJS master once agreed with the rest of the team on the changes.
If you are planning to contribute, that is the PhantomJS you should use.
Here I show how to clone this repo and kick start the (Java) tests. You need Java SDK to run them (I tested it with Java 7, but should work with Java 6 too).
git clone https://github.com/detro/ghostdriver.git
- Configure
phantomjs_exec_path
insideghostdriver/test/config.ini
to point at the build of PhantomJS you just did cd ghostdriver/test/java; ./gradlew test
phantomjs --webdriver=PORT
- Configure
driver
insideghostdriver/test/config.ini
to point at the URLhttp://localhost:PORT
cd ghostdriver/test/java; ./gradlew test
Here follows the output of the tree -hd -L 3
command, trimmed of files and "build directories":
.
├── [ 102] binding
│ └── [ 510] java
│ ├── [ 204] build
│ ├── [ 136] gradle
│ ├── [ 884] jars <--- JARs containing Binding, related Source and related JavaDoc
│ └── [ 102] src <--- Java Binding Source
├── [ 442] src <--- GhostDriver JavaScript core source
│ ├── [ 306] request_handlers <--- JavaScript "classes/functions" that handle HTTP Requests
│ └── [ 204] third_party <--- Third party/utility code
│ └── [2.0K] webdriver-atoms <--- WebDriver Atoms, automatically imported from the Selenium project
├── [ 204] test
│ ├── [ 476] java <--- Java Tests
│ │ ├── [ 136] gradle
│ │ ├── [ 136] out
│ │ └── [ 102] src
│ ├── [ 238] python <--- Python Tests
│ │ └── [ 102] utils
│ └── [ 340] testcase-issue_240
└── [ 238] tools <--- Tools (import/export)
└── [ 136] atoms_build_dir
20 directories
Being GhostDriver a WebDriver implementation, it embeds the standard/default WebDriver Atoms to operate inside open
webpages. In the specific, the Atoms cover scenarios where the "native" PhantomJS require('webpage')
don't stretch.
Documentation about how those work can be found here and here.
How are those Atoms making their way into GhostDriver? If you look inside the /tools
directory you can find a bash
script: /tools/import_atoms.sh
. That script accepts the path to a Selenium local repo, runs the
CrazyFunBuild to produce the compressed/minified Atoms,
grabs those and copies them over to the /src/third_party/webdriver-atoms
directory.
The Atoms original source lives inside the Selenium repo in the subtree of /javascript
. To understand how the build
works, you need to spend a bit of time reading about
CrazyFunBuild: worth your time if you want to contribute to
GhostDriver (or any WebDriver, as a matter of fact).
One thing it's important to mention, is that CrazyFunBuild relies on the content of build.desc
file to understand
what and how to build it. Those files define what exactly is built and what it depends on. In the case of the Atoms,
the word "build" means "run Google Closure Compiler over a set of files and compress functions into Atoms".
The definition of the Atoms that GhostDriver uses lives at /tools/atoms_build_dir/build.desc
.
Let's take this small portion of our build.desc
:
js_deps(name = "deps",
srcs = "*.js",
deps = ["//javascript/atoms:deps",
"//javascript/webdriver/atoms:deps"])
js_fragment(name = "get_element_from_cache",
module = "bot.inject.cache",
function = "bot.inject.cache.getElement",
deps = [ "//javascript/atoms:deps" ])
js_deps(name = "build_atoms",
deps = [
...
"//javascript/webdriver/atoms:execute_script",
...
]
The first part (js_deps(name = "deps"...
) declares what are the dependency of this build.desc
: with that CrazyFunBuild knows
what to build before fulfilling our build.
The second part (js_fragment(...
) defines an Atom: the get_element_from_cache
is going to be the name of
an Atom to build; it can be found in the module bot.inject.cache
and is realised by the function named
bot.inject.cache.getElement
.
The third part (js_deps(name = "build_atoms"...
) is a list of the Atoms (either defined by something like the second
part or in one of the files we declared as dependency) that we want to build.
If you reached this stage in understanding the Atoms, you are ready to go further by yourself.
You can contribute by testing GhostDriver, reporting bugs and issues, or submitting Pull Requests. Any help is welcome, but bear in mind the following base principles:
- Issue reporting requires a reproducible example, otherwise will most probably be closed without warning
- Squash your commits by theme: I prefer a clean, readable log
- Maintain consistency with the code-style you are surrounded by
- If you are going to make a big, substantial change, let's discuss it first
- I HATE CoffeeScript: assume I'm going to laugh off any "contribution" that contains such aberrating crap!
- Open Source is NOT a democracy (and I mean it!)
GhostDriver is distributed under BSD License.
See here.