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PhantomJS is a headless (no GUI) browser used for testing and capturing screen shots of web sites. I use it to test JavaScript in Ruby on Rails apps, along with Poltergeist, a driver for Capybara, the library for simulating user interaction with a web application.

  1. Go to the PhantomJS download page

  2. Download the Linux binary, it will be something like this phantomjs-1.9.2-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2

  3. un-bzip and untar the archive file.
    bunzip2 phantomjs-1.9.2-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
    tar -xvf phantomjs-1.9.2-linux-x86_64.tar
    
  4. move the file into the /opt directory
    sudo mv phantomjs-1.9.2-linux-x86_64 /opt/phantomjs
    
  5. If you don’t have a ~/bin directory in your path, now would be a good time to make one and include it in your path.

  6. Link the phantomjs executable to a link in your ~/bin directory.
    cd ~/bin
    ln -s /opt/phantomjs/bin/phantomjs phantomjs
    
  7. You’re done! Test out the phantomjs command with phantomjs --help