CasperJS Exercises

Initial Setup

• Install PhantomJS
• Run the PhantomJS Hello, World code to make sure everything's working; you can also start a PhantomJS console by running phantomjs and entering the quickstart commands manually
• Install CasperJS
• Run the CasperJS Google Scraping example

Exercise 1

• Modify Phantom's follow.js example to display the Twitter followers from the @bmorejs and your own account (if any).

• Observe the amount of control you have over the browser, but then see how cumbersome writing code like this would be for a more complex scraping application.

• Run Casper's googlelinks.js example with your own search terms (like your name).

Exercise 2

• Rewrite the follow.js code to run with Casper. There's a sample answer in the js/solutions directory of this project. No peeking unless you're stuck!

• Modify googlelinks.js or follow.js to take a screenshot of the results page and save as a png file using Casper's capture method.

Exercise 3

• Write a basic site availability tester for one of your current projects using Casper's Tester module. Check out this example for inspiration. You can run echo $? after Casper finishes to see an exit code (0 if the tests all pass; otherwise 1);

• There's also a solution for this exercise in js/solutions; again, no peeking!

Extra Credit Exploration

• Install the Casper __utils__ bookmarklet from here and try experimenting with __utils__ helpers, especially getElementByXpath and mouseEvent.

• Try using PhantomJS as a websniffer to measure the perform of one of your current web projects, as demonstrated by Ilya Grigorik.

• Write a CasperJS version of this Mechanize webscraper.

• If you are a Ruby dev, check out Poltergeist which lets you write Ruby code to drive PhantomJS.