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Ask HN: Headless broswers – use cases?
what might be interesting use cases for headless browsers like Ghost or PhantonJS, except for running tests?
- andrewchambers 12y agoI used it for logging into my bank's crappy web interface and dumping my financial data as csv. It required javascript and has no api available. This was so I could convert the data from multiple accounts to http://www.ledger-cli.org/ http://www.ledger-cli.org/ format automatically.
- mtmail 12y agoCrawling webpages. I needed to find out if a product price is actually visible to users. PhantomJS executes JS and CSS and I can execute a Javascript query to check.
- jschrf 12y agoCrawling pages is probably one of the most common use cases, I would imagine. I use PhantomJS and SlimerJS to host CLI tools written in TypeScript/JavaScript. I also run these tools in the browser because I find it a better debugging experience than remote debugging. There's a lot of functionality available through NPM and writing tools and scripts in TS can be very productive and easy to cobble things together - even advanced things.