PhantomJS On Ubuntu

PhantomJS is a web stack with JavaScript but without a user interface. These qualities are useful more widely but today I'm interested in fast integration testing for a website in EmberJS, Ruby and Rails. Time to make PhantomJS 1.5.0 run on Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10)...

PhantomJS avoids make, autoconf et al, preferring to roll their own build system. So it's best to grab a binary and follow the installation instructions. For x86 and x86_64 grab the appropriate dynamic build. For other platforms, pick a different tool...

And here's how it went...



I grabbed the binary and stashed in /usr/local/share, versioned with a symbolic link

$ cd /usr/local/share/
$ sudo tar xzvf ~/Downloads/phantomjs-1.5.0-linux-x86_64-dynamic.tar.gz
$ sudo mv phantomjs phantomjs-1.5.0-x86_64
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/phantomjs-1.5.0-x86_64/ /usr/local/share/phantomjs
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/phantomjs/bin/phantomjs /usr/local/bin/phantomjs

Freetype is sometimes a troublesome umbrella

$ sudo apt-get install freetype
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package freetype

but can be worked around

$ sudo apt-get install libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev

Simply tested

$ whereis phantomjs
phantomjs: /usr/local/bin/phantomjs
$ phantomjs --version
1.5.0

Done :-)