One major use case of PhantomJS is headless testing of web applications. It is suitable for general command-line based testing, within a precommit hook, and as part of a continuous integration system.
PhantomJS itself is not a test framework, it is only used to launch the tests via a suitable test runner.
The following table summarizes the list of various test frameworks and the corresponding test runners. If the framework does not need an external/third-party runner, it is marked as “built-in”.
| Framework | Test Runner |
|---|---|
| Buster.JS | built-in |
| Capybara | Poltergeist, Terminus |
| Mocha | Chutzpah, mocha-phantomjs |
| FuncUnit | built-in |
| Hiro | built-in |
| Karma (née Testacular) | built-in |
| Jasmine | Chutzpah, grunt-contrib-jasmine, guard-jasmine, phantom-jasmine |
| Laika | built-in |
| Preamble | built-in |
| phantom-assert | built-in |
| QUnit | qunit-phantomjs-runner, Chutzpah, Qlive, QUnited |
| Robot Framework | phantomrobot |
| Rx Test Runner | built-in |
| tape-run | built-in |
| Testem | built-in |
| Venus.js | built-in |
| WebDriver | GhostDriver |
| wru | built-in |
| YUITest | Grover, phantomjs-yuitest |
PhantomJS includes run-qunit and run-jasmine in its examples subdirectory. However, these are for illustration purposes and lack important reporting features necessary for real-world uses!
In addition, there are Related Projects which are built on top of PhantomJS to provide convenient high-level functionality for testing purposes:
Using PhantomJS with CI system such as Jenkins or TeamCity does not require special setup. Make sure PhantomJS is installed properly on the slave/build agent and it is ready to go.
Since PhantomJS is purely headless on Linux, the agent can run on an installation without any GUI. This means, a barebone Linux system without X11 is not a problem for PhantomJS. It makes it possible to spawn light build agents on Amazon EC2 or Heroku instances.
Travis CI, a popular hosted CI system, has built-in support for PhantomJS. See its documentation for details.