Installing CasperJS on Ubuntu 12.10

Recently I needed to install CasperJS. It’s a testing utility written in JavaScript on top of PhantomJS so I needed to install “the phantom” first but I noticed that installing it from source would take a long time. I decided to download and install the ready-made binary package. Below are few steps that may help you install CasperJS faster. Note that the OS I’m using is Ubuntu 12.10.

Before you start, make sure you have git installed:

sudo apt-get install git

Step 1: Installing PhantomJS

– Download the latest source

wget http://phantomjs.googlecode.com/files/phantomjs-1.8.2-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2

– Extract the archive

tar -xvf phantomjs-1.8.2-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2

– Move the extracted folder to a proper location:

sudo mv phantomjs-1.8.2-linux-x86_64 /usr/local/src/phantomjs

– Create a symbolic link so we can just type “phantomjs” when we want to use “the phantom”

sudo ln -sf /usr/local/src/phantomjs/bin/phantomjs /usr/local/bin/phantomjs

– Check if it’s working

phantomjs --version

If you see the current PhantomJS version you can proceed with installing CasperJS.

Step 2: Installing CasperJS

– Enter a proper location to avoid moving the extracted files:

cd /usr/local/src/

– Get the source from the official git repository:

sudo git clone git://github.com/n1k0/casperjs.git

– Create symbolic link

sudo ln -sf /usr/local/src/casperjs/bin/casperjs /usr/local/bin/casperjs

– Check if it’s working

casperjs --version

Voilla, you have successfully installed CasperJS!