PhantomJS


PhantomJS is a discontinued headless browser used for automating web page interaction. PhantomJS provides a JavaScript API enabling automated navigation, screenshots, user behavior and assertions making it a common tool used to run browser-based unit tests in a headless system like a continuous integration environment. PhantomJS is based on WebKit making it a similar browsing environment to Safari and Google Chrome. It is an open-source software released under the BSD License.
WWW Official Site

History

PhantomJS was released January 23, 2011 by Ariya Hidayat after several years in development.
The logo of the project commonly used to pictorially refer to PhantomJS is a fluorescent blue ghost atop a black background. This refers to the lack of graphical user interface, or main body of the browser, making PhantomJS users seem like ghosts.
In March 2018, the development of PhantomJS was suspended due to lack of active contributions.

Usage

The PhantomJS JavaScript API can be used to open web pages, take screenshots, execute user actions, and run injected JavaScript code in the page context. For example, the following code will open Wikipedia and, upon loading, will save a screenshot to a file and exit.

var page = require.create;
var url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/';
page.open;

Ecosystem

PhantomJS became valuable enough that similar projects adopted the API as a standard way of interacting with headless browsers. For example, SlimerJS provided a PhantomJS-like API, but on top of Mozilla's Gecko browser engine rather than WebKit.
Shortly after the release of PhantomJS, Nicolas Perriault wrote CasperJS, a suite of libraries on top of PhantomJS that extend its capabilities as a client for automated web page testing, allowing users to create BDD tests leveraging PhantomJS. The final release of CasperJS was in November 2017.
Yahoo! developed a version of YSlow that leverages PhantomJS to gather performance metrics for websites.

Users

Several notable companies have used PhantomJS.