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Show HN: Nightmare – Simple browser automation

429 points by pkrein 12y ago

pkrein 12y ago
Quick example of how we use this at Segment... for each integration (https://segment.io/integrations https://segment.io/integrations) we need to create a vector logo. This got a bit tedious after the first 50 :) so we built nightmare + nightmare-swiftly so that our chat bot could "auto-generate" vector logos: https://cloudup.com/cEA-dTd3glM https://cloudup.com/cEA-dTd3glM Hope it's helpful!
- bennyg 12y ago
  Is it doing this by checking colored pixel areas and making SVG shapes for them? If so, whatever you use should replace Illustrator's Image Trace functionality, cause that is so bad at creating crisp vector copies of things.
  - aarondf 12y ago
    Looks like they are submitting it to Swiftly, and then a human does it.
    - pkrein 12y ago
      yep this
    - bennyg 12y ago
      :( - I was hoping for a cool algorithm to determine that. Haha maybe I'll write one.
- baudehlo 12y ago
  Please note that because you used the base "phantom" library from npm it won't ever work with cluster (because node doesn't do the right thing with port=0 under cluster). You'd have to switch to node-phantom-simple. Which might be worthwhile anyway because the phantom library you've used proved massively unstable at scale for us - I wrote it because of the need to work under cluster, and because dnode communication was bloated and unstable.
- dhotson 12y ago
  Hey Peter, Swiftly lead dev here. Just wanted to say this is very cool! I was a little bit surprised to see us in your examples. We've been looking into improving our end-to-end testing tools, but it looks like you guys have already taken care of it. Nice work! ;-)
niix 12y ago
Very nice!
wehadfun 12y ago
I'm using casper now but this seems like it may be even easier.
- meritt 12y ago
  Yeah, there's a ton of "easier to use" libraries atop Phantom. CasperJS is by far the most recognized and community-backed. Not sure what value all of these others provide.
mknittig 12y ago
Looks like DalekJS (http://dalekjs.com/ http://dalekjs.com/)
- dcre 12y ago
  Looks good, but my god that site is hard to look at.
- dgreensp 12y ago
  Except without the cross-browser part.
- tiglionabbit 12y ago
  Or Twill for Python. (http://twill.idyll.org/python-api.html http://twill.idyll.org/python-api.html)
ankit84 12y ago
How is it different from http://nightwatchjs.org/ http://nightwatchjs.org/ ?
- pkrein 12y ago
  nightwatch looks awesome for testing, nightmare is for automation... building APIs for services that don't have them.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- JoeAcchino 12y ago
  Nightwatch runs against Selenium, Nightmare uses Phantom.js With Selenium you have full cross browser support, while Phantom is Webkit based.
mdaniel 12y ago
Ordinarily I would file a website bug, but this happens so often I'm mentioning it here to hopefully stop others from doing it, too. Please don't use fancy quotes or the fancy apostrophe for code examples on your webpage. It looks out-of-place with the rest of the fixed width font and, most importantly, it stops folks from being able to copy-and-paste your examples into their terminal or editor.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Sounds like a browser level or OS level plugin could be useful to check paste buffers and swap to|from fancy quotes.
nobotty 12y ago
so it's like casperjs except a piece of shit?
thathonkey 12y ago
I currently only have experience using CasperJS which also wraps-around PhantomJS. This has different goals (simpler) and therefore a simpler API, though. The use case at Segment (automatically generating vector logos from a given graphic) is even cooler though, I think! Thanks for sharing!
IanDrake 12y ago
I do like the work they've done with Phantom but the API is horrendous and I found myself wrapping the parts I used. Nightmare looks more complete and probably better tested than my wrapper. Well done.
chenglou 12y ago
Shameless plug: I maintain Node-huxley (https://github.com/chenglou/node-huxley https://github.com/chenglou/node-huxley), which accomplishes what this project does, but without the need for writing automation code. Also compares previous/next screenshots for you automatically.
mherrmann 12y ago
I am one of the founders of a startup that sells a similar, proprietary library for Python and Java: http://heliumhq.com http://heliumhq.com. Maybe some of the people reading this will find it interesting.
dylandempsey 12y ago
Very nice. FYI best practices are to have a CTA or indicator on your site to scroll down, so no one leaves thinking the whole site is just an image and title.
nstart 12y ago
Does anyone know how this compares to zombie js? I'm new to headless browser testing so apologies if question isn't relevant
ssharp 12y ago
Could I accomplish multi-page form automation doing something like: .goto(page1) // page 1 .type('selector', 'value') .click('selector') .wait() // page 2 .type('selector', 'value') .click('selector') .wait() etc. ? If so, that seems super easy and more straightforward than vanilla Shadow or even Casper.
- pkrein 12y ago
  that's exactly right
  - ssharp 12y ago
    Thanks, this should be absolutely perfect for a project I've been procrastinating on :)
henrygrew 12y ago
I'm building a bot using this, any idea of proxies i can use to change the source ip's and how i can use it with a proxy?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
tucosan 12y ago
Even after substituting the fancy ampersands on your homepage, and requiring nightmare your example still does not run: var Nightmare = require('nightmare'); new Nightmare() .goto('http://yahoo.com') .type('input[title="Search"]', 'github nightmare') .click('.searchsubmit') .run(); yields: node yahoo.js phantom stdout: TypeError: 'null' is not an object (evaluating 'element.value = text') phantom stdout: phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():3 phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():4 phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():4 stream.js:94 throw er; // Unhandled stream error in pipe. ^ TypeError: undefined is not a function at next (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/lib/index.js:56:23) at f (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/once/once.js:16:25) at Proto.apply (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/node_modules/dnode-protocol/index.js:123:13) at Proto.handle (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/node_modules/dnode-protocol/index.js:99:19) at D.dnode.handle (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/lib/dnode.js:140:21) at D.dnode.write (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/lib/dnode.js:128:22) at SockJSConnection.ondata (stream.js:51:26) at SockJSConnection.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:107:17) at Session.didMessage (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/shoe/node_modules/sockjs/lib/transport.js:220:25) at WebSocketReceiver.didMessage (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/shoe/node_modules/sockjs/lib/trans-websocket.js:102:40) The examples in the githubs pages readme don't run either. I am too lazy to debug this.
- resu_nimda 12y ago
  I got it to run by providing a callback to the 'run' function: run(function(){ console.log('done'); }); By default there is no indication of completion, hence the log.
- pkrein 12y ago
  hey sorry about that, just realized i forgot to npm publish v1.1.0 -- published now hope that helps
  - 12y ago
brickmort 12y ago
Extra points for page design!
novaleaf 12y ago
obligatory self-promotion, for those interested in an easy to use PhantomJs: https://PhantomJsCloud.com https://PhantomJsCloud.com
- novaleaf 12y ago
  oh, and I'd love to let my users use nightmare in their scrips, but I don't know an easy way to sandbox the requested phantomjs instance :(
wearhere 12y ago
What is the project's background image (http://www.nightmarejs.org/nightmarejs.org/images/ground.jpg http://www.nightmarejs.org/nightmarejs.org/images/ground.jpg)?
- AnkhMorporkian 12y ago
  That's a photo that Frank Hurley took on his (nearly doomed) antarctic adventure with Ernest Shackleton. You can find scads more photos here: http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/endurance/ http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/endurance/
  - wearhere 12y ago
    Wow, thanks for the info! What an amazing story, and photos.
    - AnkhMorporkian 12y ago
      It really is. Hurley is one of my favorite photographers of all time; his stuff just captured the essence of the time so well!
resu_nimda 12y ago
I've been wanting to programmatically get my transaction details from my bank for a while. I knew about phantomJS but never got around to trying it out. When I saw this I decided to give it a shot, and within half an hour I was able to log into my bank's website (a complicated multi-step process that I had failed to achieve with just POST requests). Nice tool, thanks. The debugging could use a bit of work - whenever something went wrong it just spit out a bunch of "null is not an object" messages from phantom. Overall it was very easy to use though.
- Lord_Zero 12y ago
  Whats a good way to automate this to run? I see the getting started in the documentation says "Save it as hello.js and then run it from the command line" but Iwasnt sure if there are tools like CRON in Linux to automate the script.
  - resu_nimda 12y ago
    That is the documentation for phantomjs, which is a stand-alone process. Nightmare is a package for nodejs (that interacts with a phantomjs process), so your code runs in a node context, where there are plenty of scheduling options, e.g. the node-cron package, or just plain setInterval().
- montecarl 12y ago
  I really want to do this with the two accounts I have at different banks. Neither makes it easy to automatically download my transactions. What I want is to run a command to run to download the latest transactions and output some simple ledger-like[1] output. When I have tried to do double entry account before it was tricky to keep up. I would spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I had already reconciled and what I had not. 1: http://www.ledger-cli.org/ http://www.ledger-cli.org/
curiously 12y ago
the problem with Phantom.js is that compared to an actual browser it still falls short. I've given up on Phantom.js all together because it is actually not a true replacement for Selenium running on an actual browser. I found it far more reliable to have Firefox running on Xvfb for when I'm testing without worrying about Phantom.js behaving wildly.
- smellf 12y ago
  It's definitely for a different use case. Phantom/Nightmare is for automating web page interaction, whereas Selenium is for cross-browser testing.
  - curiously 12y ago
    You can use Selenium for automation and web page interaction. There is just an overhead of running Xvfb but it's trivial to setup. What I mean is that PhantomJS engine still falls short of a real browser. Advantage of running a real browser with Xvfb is that you won't ever have to worry about if the page is going to render properly or have it behave the way you expect it to. The overhead is not of a big deal, in fact it's a tradeoff for rendering accuracy. Don't get me wrong headless browser like PhantomJS is headed in the right direction but if compatibility with website is crucial for your success, it is not enough and I just don't have a lot of confidence that it will replace a real browser with Xvfb. Basically the Javascript libraries are reinventing a lot of the wheels that have already been done in other languages before the explosion of Node.js.
- EGreg 12y ago
  How about slimer.js for FF?
  - curiously 12y ago
    firefoxdriver already exists in many other languages, I don't know what is the point of writing it all over again for javascript. The callback stuff gets messy. I still much prefer Python or even Java to write my tests.
- 12y ago
oldboyFX 12y ago
Interesting background... creepy is good.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
It's a polished website... and I know what javascript is, but they didn't do a good job of explaining what it is. Browser automation? Is this a test suite of some sort, something like selenium? Or is it more like Mechanize?
SnowProblem 12y ago
As someone entirely unfamiliar with both Nightmare and PhantomJS, what is the typical use case? It isn't obvious to me from the examples or FAQs. Why prefer these over something like Selenium?
- elwell 12y ago
  I assume because it's more light-weight and hence suited better for certain needs.
brianzelip 12y ago
Segment usually puts out great tools and crisp sites!
ryanackley 12y ago
Looks like an interesting library. I have no use for it right now but maybe one day. Definitely can see why this would be useful for some people though. Their website has some serious style. It looks cool and original. Which raises a meta-issue that has been bugging me for a while. This is the bar you have to meet for even an open source project nowadays. It's not enough for you to pour your blood sweat and tears into something and then give it away for free. You then have to create slick looking site to market it and get people's attention.
- annnnd 12y ago
  Not really... Counterexample: http://www.haproxy.org/ http://www.haproxy.org/ :) I think most of the people don't care about the fab wrap, as long as the product works properly.
fimdomeio 12y ago
so... how does one query the DOM? It looks it has been left out of the api. Does this mean that Nightmare is only able to do brainless automation without checking browser results?
dutzi_ 12y ago
Nice work! Can you please provide an example for using `evaluate()` to get the page's content? I tried this, but didn't get anything: new Nightmare() .goto('http://yahoo.com') .evaluate(function (page) { return this.content; }, function (res) {console.log(res);}) .run();
- pkrein 12y ago
  extracting stuff seems to be a common use case so added an example to the readme for ya: https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare#examples https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare#examples
tuxone 12y ago
Fantastic easy tool! There is a way to pass phantomjs command line options (eg. --ssl-protocol=X ) through nightmarejs?
- tuxone 12y ago
  Found it, line 108 in lib/index.js - phantom.create({ port: port }, function(instance) { + phantom.create({ port: port}, "--ssl-protocol=X", function(instance) {
  - henballs 12y ago
    Have you tried this? It's not working for me :| I'm getting about:blank everytime I hit a web address using ssl.
andrey-p 12y ago
And, if you want a very very thin wrapper around Phantom (essentially a phantom script manager), feel free to have a look at this instead: https://github.com/andrey-p/ectoplasm-js https://github.com/andrey-p/ectoplasm-js Pardon the shameless plug.
thinkvitamin 12y ago
I use Ubuntu Linux, and I've got PhantomJS installed. Whether I use Nightmare, Nightmarejs, or Phantomjs on the command line this is what I get: ReferenceError: Can't find variable: Nightmare nightmare.js:1 Should there be more instructions for installing? I believe the brew command is something for Mac users only...

429 points by pkrein 12y ago

Quick example of how we use this at Segment... for each integration (https://segment.io/integrations https://segment.io/integrations) we need to create a vector logo. This got a bit tedious after the first 50 :) so we built nightmare + nightmare-swiftly so that our chat bot could "auto-generate" vector logos: https://cloudup.com/cEA-dTd3glM https://cloudup.com/cEA-dTd3glM Hope it's helpful!

bennyg 12y ago
Is it doing this by checking colored pixel areas and making SVG shapes for them? If so, whatever you use should replace Illustrator's Image Trace functionality, cause that is so bad at creating crisp vector copies of things.
- aarondf 12y ago
  Looks like they are submitting it to Swiftly, and then a human does it.
  - pkrein 12y ago
    yep this
  - bennyg 12y ago
    :( - I was hoping for a cool algorithm to determine that. Haha maybe I'll write one.
baudehlo 12y ago
Please note that because you used the base "phantom" library from npm it won't ever work with cluster (because node doesn't do the right thing with port=0 under cluster). You'd have to switch to node-phantom-simple. Which might be worthwhile anyway because the phantom library you've used proved massively unstable at scale for us - I wrote it because of the need to work under cluster, and because dnode communication was bloated and unstable.
dhotson 12y ago
Hey Peter, Swiftly lead dev here. Just wanted to say this is very cool! I was a little bit surprised to see us in your examples. We've been looking into improving our end-to-end testing tools, but it looks like you guys have already taken care of it. Nice work! ;-)

niix 12y ago

Very nice!

wehadfun 12y ago

I'm using casper now but this seems like it may be even easier.

meritt 12y ago
Yeah, there's a ton of "easier to use" libraries atop Phantom. CasperJS is by far the most recognized and community-backed. Not sure what value all of these others provide.

mknittig 12y ago

Looks like DalekJS (http://dalekjs.com/ http://dalekjs.com/)

dcre 12y ago
Looks good, but my god that site is hard to look at.
dgreensp 12y ago
Except without the cross-browser part.
tiglionabbit 12y ago
Or Twill for Python. (http://twill.idyll.org/python-api.html http://twill.idyll.org/python-api.html)

ankit84 12y ago

How is it different from http://nightwatchjs.org/ http://nightwatchjs.org/ ?

pkrein 12y ago
nightwatch looks awesome for testing, nightmare is for automation... building APIs for services that don't have them.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
JoeAcchino 12y ago
Nightwatch runs against Selenium, Nightmare uses Phantom.js With Selenium you have full cross browser support, while Phantom is Webkit based.

mdaniel 12y ago

Ordinarily I would file a website bug, but this happens so often I'm mentioning it here to hopefully stop others from doing it, too. Please don't use fancy quotes or the fancy apostrophe for code examples on your webpage. It looks out-of-place with the rest of the fixed width font and, most importantly, it stops folks from being able to copy-and-paste your examples into their terminal or editor.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
Sounds like a browser level or OS level plugin could be useful to check paste buffers and swap to|from fancy quotes.

nobotty 12y ago

so it's like casperjs except a piece of shit?

thathonkey 12y ago

I currently only have experience using CasperJS which also wraps-around PhantomJS. This has different goals (simpler) and therefore a simpler API, though. The use case at Segment (automatically generating vector logos from a given graphic) is even cooler though, I think! Thanks for sharing!

IanDrake 12y ago

I do like the work they've done with Phantom but the API is horrendous and I found myself wrapping the parts I used. Nightmare looks more complete and probably better tested than my wrapper. Well done.

chenglou 12y ago

Shameless plug: I maintain Node-huxley (https://github.com/chenglou/node-huxley https://github.com/chenglou/node-huxley), which accomplishes what this project does, but without the need for writing automation code. Also compares previous/next screenshots for you automatically.

mherrmann 12y ago

I am one of the founders of a startup that sells a similar, proprietary library for Python and Java: http://heliumhq.com http://heliumhq.com. Maybe some of the people reading this will find it interesting.

dylandempsey 12y ago

Very nice. FYI best practices are to have a CTA or indicator on your site to scroll down, so no one leaves thinking the whole site is just an image and title.

nstart 12y ago

Does anyone know how this compares to zombie js? I'm new to headless browser testing so apologies if question isn't relevant

ssharp 12y ago

Could I accomplish multi-page form automation doing something like: .goto(page1) // page 1 .type('selector', 'value') .click('selector') .wait() // page 2 .type('selector', 'value') .click('selector') .wait() etc. ? If so, that seems super easy and more straightforward than vanilla Shadow or even Casper.

pkrein 12y ago
that's exactly right
- ssharp 12y ago
  Thanks, this should be absolutely perfect for a project I've been procrastinating on :)

henrygrew 12y ago

I'm building a bot using this, any idea of proxies i can use to change the source ip's and how i can use it with a proxy?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

tucosan 12y ago

Even after substituting the fancy ampersands on your homepage, and requiring nightmare your example still does not run: var Nightmare = require('nightmare'); new Nightmare() .goto('http://yahoo.com') .type('input[title="Search"]', 'github nightmare') .click('.searchsubmit') .run(); yields: node yahoo.js phantom stdout: TypeError: 'null' is not an object (evaluating 'element.value = text') phantom stdout: phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():3 phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():4 phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():4 stream.js:94 throw er; // Unhandled stream error in pipe. ^ TypeError: undefined is not a function at next (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/lib/index.js:56:23) at f (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/once/once.js:16:25) at Proto.apply (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/node_modules/dnode-protocol/index.js:123:13) at Proto.handle (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/node_modules/dnode-protocol/index.js:99:19) at D.dnode.handle (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/lib/dnode.js:140:21) at D.dnode.write (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/lib/dnode.js:128:22) at SockJSConnection.ondata (stream.js:51:26) at SockJSConnection.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:107:17) at Session.didMessage (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/shoe/node_modules/sockjs/lib/transport.js:220:25) at WebSocketReceiver.didMessage (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/shoe/node_modules/sockjs/lib/trans-websocket.js:102:40) The examples in the githubs pages readme don't run either. I am too lazy to debug this.

resu_nimda 12y ago
I got it to run by providing a callback to the 'run' function: run(function(){ console.log('done'); }); By default there is no indication of completion, hence the log.
pkrein 12y ago
hey sorry about that, just realized i forgot to npm publish v1.1.0 -- published now hope that helps
- 12y ago

brickmort 12y ago

Extra points for page design!

novaleaf 12y ago

obligatory self-promotion, for those interested in an easy to use PhantomJs: https://PhantomJsCloud.com https://PhantomJsCloud.com

novaleaf 12y ago
oh, and I'd love to let my users use nightmare in their scrips, but I don't know an easy way to sandbox the requested phantomjs instance :(

wearhere 12y ago

What is the project's background image (http://www.nightmarejs.org/nightmarejs.org/images/ground.jpg http://www.nightmarejs.org/nightmarejs.org/images/ground.jpg)?

AnkhMorporkian 12y ago
That's a photo that Frank Hurley took on his (nearly doomed) antarctic adventure with Ernest Shackleton. You can find scads more photos here: http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/endurance/ http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/endurance/
- wearhere 12y ago
  Wow, thanks for the info! What an amazing story, and photos.
  - AnkhMorporkian 12y ago
    It really is. Hurley is one of my favorite photographers of all time; his stuff just captured the essence of the time so well!

resu_nimda 12y ago

I've been wanting to programmatically get my transaction details from my bank for a while. I knew about phantomJS but never got around to trying it out. When I saw this I decided to give it a shot, and within half an hour I was able to log into my bank's website (a complicated multi-step process that I had failed to achieve with just POST requests). Nice tool, thanks. The debugging could use a bit of work - whenever something went wrong it just spit out a bunch of "null is not an object" messages from phantom. Overall it was very easy to use though.

Lord_Zero 12y ago
Whats a good way to automate this to run? I see the getting started in the documentation says "Save it as hello.js and then run it from the command line" but Iwasnt sure if there are tools like CRON in Linux to automate the script.
- resu_nimda 12y ago
  That is the documentation for phantomjs, which is a stand-alone process. Nightmare is a package for nodejs (that interacts with a phantomjs process), so your code runs in a node context, where there are plenty of scheduling options, e.g. the node-cron package, or just plain setInterval().
montecarl 12y ago
I really want to do this with the two accounts I have at different banks. Neither makes it easy to automatically download my transactions. What I want is to run a command to run to download the latest transactions and output some simple ledger-like[1] output. When I have tried to do double entry account before it was tricky to keep up. I would spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I had already reconciled and what I had not. 1: http://www.ledger-cli.org/ http://www.ledger-cli.org/

curiously 12y ago

the problem with Phantom.js is that compared to an actual browser it still falls short. I've given up on Phantom.js all together because it is actually not a true replacement for Selenium running on an actual browser. I found it far more reliable to have Firefox running on Xvfb for when I'm testing without worrying about Phantom.js behaving wildly.

smellf 12y ago
It's definitely for a different use case. Phantom/Nightmare is for automating web page interaction, whereas Selenium is for cross-browser testing.
- curiously 12y ago
  You can use Selenium for automation and web page interaction. There is just an overhead of running Xvfb but it's trivial to setup. What I mean is that PhantomJS engine still falls short of a real browser. Advantage of running a real browser with Xvfb is that you won't ever have to worry about if the page is going to render properly or have it behave the way you expect it to. The overhead is not of a big deal, in fact it's a tradeoff for rendering accuracy. Don't get me wrong headless browser like PhantomJS is headed in the right direction but if compatibility with website is crucial for your success, it is not enough and I just don't have a lot of confidence that it will replace a real browser with Xvfb. Basically the Javascript libraries are reinventing a lot of the wheels that have already been done in other languages before the explosion of Node.js.
EGreg 12y ago
How about slimer.js for FF?
- curiously 12y ago
  firefoxdriver already exists in many other languages, I don't know what is the point of writing it all over again for javascript. The callback stuff gets messy. I still much prefer Python or even Java to write my tests.
12y ago

oldboyFX 12y ago

Interesting background... creepy is good.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

It's a polished website... and I know what javascript is, but they didn't do a good job of explaining what it is. Browser automation? Is this a test suite of some sort, something like selenium? Or is it more like Mechanize?

SnowProblem 12y ago

As someone entirely unfamiliar with both Nightmare and PhantomJS, what is the typical use case? It isn't obvious to me from the examples or FAQs. Why prefer these over something like Selenium?

elwell 12y ago
I assume because it's more light-weight and hence suited better for certain needs.

brianzelip 12y ago

Segment usually puts out great tools and crisp sites!

ryanackley 12y ago

Looks like an interesting library. I have no use for it right now but maybe one day. Definitely can see why this would be useful for some people though. Their website has some serious style. It looks cool and original. Which raises a meta-issue that has been bugging me for a while. This is the bar you have to meet for even an open source project nowadays. It's not enough for you to pour your blood sweat and tears into something and then give it away for free. You then have to create slick looking site to market it and get people's attention.

annnnd 12y ago
Not really... Counterexample: http://www.haproxy.org/ http://www.haproxy.org/ :) I think most of the people don't care about the fab wrap, as long as the product works properly.

fimdomeio 12y ago

so... how does one query the DOM? It looks it has been left out of the api. Does this mean that Nightmare is only able to do brainless automation without checking browser results?

dutzi_ 12y ago

Nice work! Can you please provide an example for using `evaluate()` to get the page's content? I tried this, but didn't get anything: new Nightmare() .goto('http://yahoo.com') .evaluate(function (page) { return this.content; }, function (res) {console.log(res);}) .run();

pkrein 12y ago
extracting stuff seems to be a common use case so added an example to the readme for ya: https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare#examples https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare#examples

tuxone 12y ago

Fantastic easy tool! There is a way to pass phantomjs command line options (eg. --ssl-protocol=X ) through nightmarejs?

tuxone 12y ago
Found it, line 108 in lib/index.js - phantom.create({ port: port }, function(instance) { + phantom.create({ port: port}, "--ssl-protocol=X", function(instance) {
- henballs 12y ago
  Have you tried this? It's not working for me :| I'm getting about:blank everytime I hit a web address using ssl.

andrey-p 12y ago

And, if you want a very very thin wrapper around Phantom (essentially a phantom script manager), feel free to have a look at this instead: https://github.com/andrey-p/ectoplasm-js https://github.com/andrey-p/ectoplasm-js Pardon the shameless plug.

thinkvitamin 12y ago

I use Ubuntu Linux, and I've got PhantomJS installed. Whether I use Nightmare, Nightmarejs, or Phantomjs on the command line this is what I get: ReferenceError: Can't find variable: Nightmare nightmare.js:1 Should there be more instructions for installing? I believe the brew command is something for Mac users only...