phantom.net

phantom.net was written specifically for developers looking to expose phantomjs as a network service. The library allows developers to quickly host phantomjs as a http accessible endpoint, and pass it urls and content to render. phantom.net will respond with readable streams. Useful for writing results to disk, or back out as http response.

var phantom = require('phantom.net')
 
var client = new phantom.Client('http://localhost:5000')
 
var parameter = {url: 'http://google.com', mime: 'application/pdf'}
 
client.render(parameter, function(readstream) {
    
    var writestream = require('fs').createWriteStream('output.pdf')	
 
    readstream.pipe(writestream)
})

The client render() method accepts a single parameter which is passed to phantomjs for rendering. Below is the parameter definition. When passing this parameter, either url or content must be set. The mime is required, and can be either 'application/pdf', image/jpg', 'image/png' or 'image/gif'

By default, phantom.net will wait 200ms for a page to render. A client can modify this value to increase the allowed for the page to load. The following will wait 2 seconds.

var phantom = require('phantom.net')
 
var client = new phantom.Client('http://localhost:5000')
 
client.render({url: 'http://google.com', mime: 'application/pdf', wait: 2000}, function(readstream) {
    
})

By default, the phantom.net server will put limits on waiting (the default is 4 seconds), however you can override the maximum wait as follows...

 
var phantom = require('phantom.net')
 
var server = new phantom.Server(5000, {maximum_wait: 10000})
 

If running the server on a windows machine, rendering may take a considerable amount of time. If this is a issue, you can speed things up unchecking 'automatically detect settings' in internet explorers LAN settings, as follows...

• open up internet explorer.
• options > internet options > connections (tab).
• uncheck 'automatically detect settings'.
• click ok.