Installing SlimerJS-lightweight edition

SlimerJS is similar to PhantomJs, a scriptable browser, except that it runs on top of Gecko, the browser engine of Mozilla Firefox (specifically, version 31), instead of Webkit, and is not yet truly headless.

Since SlimerJS  uses the version of firefox passed in the SLIMERJSLAUNCHER environment variable, edge builds of Firefox can be used. That can be useful for testing and experimenting with modern web-functionality, which is not yet present in PhantomJS.

Since I already have Firefox installed, i will install SlimerJS Lightweight edition from
https://slimerjs.org/download.html:

First download the lightweigt edition 0.9. 6  .zip file to the Downloads directory, then:

cd Downloads
mkdir slimedir
unzip slimerjs-0.9.6.zip -d slimedir


Then open the .bashrc file in a texteditor and at the end insert:

export PATH=$PATH:/Downloads/slimedir/slimerjs-0.9.6

export PATH=$PATH:/Downloads/slimedir/slimerjs-0.9.6/chrome/icons/default

Then reboot.

Basic examples
Get options:


slimerjs --help


A casperjs scriptfile ,here denoted file.js, can be run in context of slimerjs via:

casperjs file.js --engine=slimerjs

From slimerjs.org, an example.js file is:

var webpage = require('webpage').create();
webpage
  .open('http://somewhere') // loads a page
  .then(function(){ // executed after loading
    // store a screenshot of the page
    webpage.viewportSize =
        { width:650, height:320 };
    webpage.render('page.png',
                   {onlyViewport:true});
    // then open a second page
    return webpage.open('http://somewhere2');
  })
  .then(function(){
    // click somewhere on the second page
    webpage.sendEvent("click", 5, 5,
                        'left', 0);
    slimer.exit()
  });

 

The above is run via:

slimerjs example.js