Nightmare JS not working

javascript node.js phantomjs browser-automation nightmare
AL-Kateb picture AL-Kateb · Apr 19, 2016 · Viewed 8.6k times · Source

I know the title of the question looks very vague! But that's there's to it.

I installed nodejs on my production server, which had phantomjs working properly, then I installed nightmare via npm install nightmare, I can see it in node_modules, I tried the example listed by the developers on github:

var Nightmare = require('nightmare');
var nightmare = Nightmare({ show: true })

nightmare
  .goto('http://yahoo.com')
  .type('input[title="Search"]', 'github nightmare')
  .click('#uh-search-button')
  .wait('#main')
  .evaluate(function () {
    return document.querySelector('#main .searchCenterMiddle li a').href
  })
  .end()
  .then(function (result) {
    console.log(result)
  })

Nothing happened, the script did not output anything, I simplified the script to a simple single goto, for a page on my server, the page was never called when I ran the script via node file.js

I have CentOS 6.7, phantomjs 1.1 I also tested it on a fresh CentOS 7 installation with latest version of phantomjs, same thing.

Am I missing some kind of prerequisite or something? How do I debug the issue since node script.js is not giving any output

UPDATE: Apparently the problem is, electron, which is used by nightmare 'instead of phantomjs' requires a graphical enviroment, which is why it fails to run in my enviroment.

Answer

hassansin picture hassansin · Apr 19, 2016

New version of Nightmare requires electron, Not PhantomsJs. Make sure electron command is in your $PATH variable.

Install Electron

npm i -g electron-prebuilt

To debug:

DEBUG=nightmare* node script.js

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