Switch from PhantomJS to Chrome's headless mode

PhantomJS 2.5 may never reach the stable state (GitHub milestone shows that it’s 27% complete). Chrome has obviously more stable development team 😉 and leads the improve the web initiative - webp and spdy/http2 to name just a few.

Let’s consider porting phantomas (and rename it to chromas? 😄 ) to use Chrome (and Firefox) run in a headless mode for performance auditing / monitoring.

Chrome vs PhantomJS vs SlimerJS

Resources

• https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5678767817097216 (since Chrome 59)
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Headless_mode (since Firefox 55)
• https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/
• https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/debugger-protocol-viewer
• https://github.com/cyrus-and/chrome-remote-interface - sniffing HTTP traffic
• https://medium.com/@marco.luethy/running-headless-chrome-on-aws-lambda-fa82ad33a9eb
• https://www.aymen-loukil.com/en/blog-en/google-puppeteer-tutorial-with-examples/
• https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15344 - PhantomJS repository has been archived
• https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/gui-and-headless-browsers/#using-the-chrome-addon-in-the-headless-mode

Libraries

• ~https://github.com/adieuadieu/node-headless-chrome (work in progress, Windows support is missing)~
• https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer

Puppeteer troubleshooting

• https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/docs/troubleshooting.md#setting-up-chrome-linux-sandbox

Initial work

Is being done in this gist - https://gist.github.com/macbre/fded35f86893bace033e3790079bee76

[macbre]

Guys,

It’s been a while since the last activity in this thread. I want to give phantomas a new kick and refactor it to be more modular and use Puppeteer (headless Chromium) instead of PhantomJS (rest in peace, you’ve served us well!).

Here’s my list of ideas, directions, notes:

• Get rid of two rendering engines (SlimerJS and PhantomJS) and rely solely on headless Chromium (provided by Puppeteer package from Google)
• phantomas v2.0 will be a npm module only - no command line tool, various reporters, etc. Just a basic options handling, core modules and events emitting. Results will be returned as an object via Promise.
• In phantomas-v2 branch I will port modules one by one and make sure tests pass
• Command line tool and various reporters will be moved to a new macbre/phantomas-cli repository
• Provide macbre/phantomas docker container with CLI tool and reporters installed for an easy deployment

Some basic work has started here - https://gist.github.com/macbre/fded35f86893bace033e3790079bee76#file-script-js

@gmetais - your feedback on what will make your life with YellowLabTools easier are more than welcome here 😃

[OzzyCzech]

+1