Ian McNally

PhantomJS 2 in Travis CI

December 30, 2015

I was continuing work on my web boilerplate (note: now moved under the stride-nyc org) when I decided to add Travis CI integration for builds.

Travis CI is triggered on pushes to certain branches and on pull requests. To configure it, you create a .travis.yml file in your repository. My tests are running using a forked PhantomJS 2 launcher with Karma, which makes running your tests against PhantomJS 2 really easy, while we wait for official support. So, what’s the problem? The launcher works great locally, but doesn’t work on Travis CI’s Ubuntu machines.

After some Googling, I landed on a post by Mediocre Labs. It describes how to pre-install a custom built PhantomJS 2 binary on Travis CI. That part worked just fine, but I still found myself fighting with the PhantomJS2 launcher which wouldn’t recognize the custom binary, as well as the PhantomJS v1 launcher, which requires an npm dependency on PhantomJS, which isn’t an option.

I worked around it by explicitly pointing to the TravisCI custom PhantomJS binary in my build task. It nicely overrides the binary location for the PhantomJS2 launcher. So putting it all together, here’s the build task:

env PHANTOMJS_BIN=/usr/local/bin/phantomjs karma start

And the .travis.yml config to download the custom PhantomJS 2 binary:

before_install:

And if you’re really curious, here’s the project on Travis CI.

Happy coding!

Ian McNally

Hey, I'm Ian. I build websites and write about what I learn as I go. Follow me on Twitter.