Cookbook — CasperJS 1.1.0-DEV documentation

# Cookbook

This is a collection of scripts and ideas that aim to solve common situations that are encountered by users. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and we encourage you to contribute your recipes on github.

## Creating a web service

Warning

It is worth noting that this is probably not the best of ideas. You should be careful of things like memory leaks, lack of long term stability (due to said leaks), and the overall memory hog that headless JS can be.

With the above caveat in mind, a web service would look something like:

    //filename: server.js

    //define ip and port to web service
    var ip_server = '127.0.0.1:8585';

    //includes web server modules
    var server = require('webserver').create();

    //start web server
    var service = server.listen(ip_server, function(request, response) {
      var links = [];
      var casper = require('casper').create();

      function getLinks() {
        var links = document.querySelectorAll('h3.r a');
        return Array.prototype.map.call(links, function(e) {
          return e.getAttribute('href')
        });
      }

      casper.start('http://google.com/', function() {
        // search for 'casperjs' from google form
        this.fill('form[action="/search"]', { q: request.postRaw }, true);
      });

      casper.then(function() {
        // aggregate results for the 'casperjs' search
        links = this.evaluate(getLinks);
      });

      casper.run(function() {
        response.statusCode = 200;

        //sends results as JSON object
        response.write(JSON.stringify(links, null, null));
        response.close();
      });
    });
    console.log('Server running at http://' + ip_server+'/');

You can start the server by executing:

    casperjs server.js

You can then access the results via an HTTP POST request:

    curl --data "casperjs" http://127.0.0.1:8585/

The above command would search for “casperjs” on google and return a JSON array of results. This is a trivial example and can be expanded into something more complex.