I used PhantomJS as part of a report generation pipeline which served no HTTP requests and contacted no outside servers. We made PDFs and ready-to-email, singl

I used PhantomJS as part of a report generation pipeline which served no HTTP requests and contacted no outside servers. We made PDFs and ready-to-email, single-file HTML reports with some minimal interactive features. (Ready-to-email, single file == all images turned into data URIs, styles inlined, for HTML files sent as attachments) PhantomJS loaded up an HTML file written earlier in the pipeline. The HTML consisted of a big slug of JSON containing all the relevant data (which would vary from one run to another) and a bunch of scripts and templates (which were fixed for any given report type). The scripts built into the HTML file would chew up the JSON slug and build up the DOM required for the report. Then the PhantomJS script would identify all the images in the DOM and replace all of them with data URIs, strip out the JSON slug to prevent giving away more data than contained in the DOM, and strip out all of the templating JavaScript, leaving behind only the JavaScript needed for the interactive features, which was inlined. We went with PrinceXML for PDF generation. I was briefly nervous because I saw people praising PhantomJS' pdf generation capabilities... but then I saw the people saying, "we used PhantomJS for pdf generation, we used wkhtmltopdf, then we just paid some money to get something that wouldn't produce weird output some of the time." CSS Paged Media Module FTW, y'all.