• Allows you to drive phantomjs from node
• Does not rely on alert side effects for communicating with phantomjs
• Uses Phantom's embedded mongoose web server for communication - more efficient, simpler, faster.
• Provides a full api - including a parametrized evaluate function - no more hard coded strings
• Provides additional useful methods such as waitForSelector
• Can easily integrate with feature testing frameworks such as cucumber, jasmine, mocha

PhantomJs is an incredibly useful tool for functional and unit testing. PhantomJs runs in its own process, making it difficult to drive from node. Phantom-proxy solves this problem, allowing you to fully drive phantomjs from node.

npm install phantom-proxy

var phantomProxy = require('phantom-proxy');

phantomProxy.create({}, function (proxy) {
    var page = proxy.page;
    page.open('http://www.w3.org', function () {
        page.waitForSelector('body', function () {
            console.log('body tag present');
            phantomProxy.end();
        });
    });

});

See the API documentation for more usage information.

The short answer is that phantom-proxy has a better implementation. Other drivers seem to use a side effect of alerts to communicate with phantomjs, which unfortunately is not a good long term solution. Also all the other libraries I have seen do not have a fully implemented the evaluate function - you can't pass additional arguments to the client side function. This is a big problem and was the main motivation for creating this package.

• 2012-10-22 - version 0.1.2
  • breaking - changed the way events are consumed, switched to using nodes emmitter to brodcast events as opposed to invoking instance methods on the object. To fix issues, use [object].on('eventname') style syntax.
  • Code clean up
• 2012-10-17 - version 0.1.16
  • fixed waitforSelector issue
• 2012-10-12 - version 0.1.15
  • fixed a problem w/ waitforSelector fn.
  • fixed problem where process wasn't shutting down existing server.
• version 0.1.13
  • added args property handling for phantom object
  • added ability to specify port for rpc channel
  • added timeout on waitforSelector function
  • added ability to pass cmd line arguments for phantom via options object
• version 0.1.10
  • cleaned up and reorganized code
  • added unit tests
  • fixed process related issues