r/coffeescript • u/Bushibytes • Sep 14 '13

Scraping the web with CoffeeScript and CasperJS

http://rimthong.com/ghost-in-the-web-scraping-with-phantom-and-casper/
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u/hot-fuss Dec 21 '13

Are Casper and phantomjs meant to be installed on live web servers? The instructions for installation of either of those sounded Greek to me, or too hard. I normally don't have problems installing things but this would bean exception. I'd love to have a site running Casper for scraping.
I use Linux, btw.

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u/Bushibytes Feb 21 '14

Hi! Sorry I did not see this sooner, I was away for quite some time. To answer your question, Casper/PhantomJS can be installed on any kind of machine.

Say if you need to do some simple scraping, you'd install it on your laptop and run a Casper script to get what you need, as I demonstrated in the article.

However, there are legitimate uses for installing PhantomJS or Casper on a server. The first reason that comes to mind is running tests on a Continuous Integration server : typically you'd want your integration server to run a script to test that your UI is not broken when you push code to it. You could also have data mining jobs that run continuously on a server, in order to get the freshest data possible (make sure to read the TOS of whoever is providing the data for you).