How do I get PhantomJS / CasperJS working on Cygwin? - cygwin

Question

I am having trouble getting PhantomJS and CasperJS working within the cygwin environment. I am very new to cygwin. I was able to download both packages for windows and run them via windows cmd.
To get them to work with Cygwin, I tried the following:
I downloaded the tar/zip files for both PhantomJS and CasperJS, I copied the contents on the "bin" folders into C:\cygwin\bin. But when I type in phantomjs on cygwin I get:
/usr/bin/phantomjs: cannot execute binary file
Then, I tried to do:
pip install git+git://github.com/ariya/phantomjs
but after waiting for a while I get the following response:
Downloading/unpacking git+git://github.com/ariya/phantomjs Cloning
git://github.com/ariya/phantomjs to /tmp/pip-dCF1oZ-build Running
setup.py egg_info for package from
git+git://github.com/ariya/phantomjs
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 16, in
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/tmp/pip-dCF1oZ-build/setup.py'
Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 16, in
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory:
'/tmp/pip-dCF1oZ-build/setup.py'
---------------------------------------- Command python setup.py egg_info failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-dCF1oZ-build Storing
complete log in /home/tkondapalli/.pip/pip.log
Does any one have any advice on how to get this working? Does anyone use PhantomJS/CasperJS in the cygwin environment?
Also, I thought the .exe I am downloading and copying into the C:\cygwin\bin directory is the one for linux, so maybe that doesn't work? So this means that I need to compile from source on cygwin...
So, I started following directions for building phantomjs: http://phantomjs.org/build.html
The first thing we need to do is build OpenSSL for devel, but again I don't know how to do this for cygwin! So I just skipped this step for now, which is probably not right.
I did download the source from github and tried to build it. It failed with the follow error:
Makefile:217: recipe for target `qtemporaryfile.o' failed make: *
[qtemporaryfile.o] Error 1 make: * Waiting for unfinished jobs....
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.
./build.sh: line 90: src/qt/bin/qmake: No such file or directory
Earlier I had downloaded the executables for Linux, so it was not working. This time I downloaded the executables for windows and put it in C:/cygwin/bin, and it worked!
I don't understand why I would need to download the windows executable, when cygwin is a linux emulator. This confuses me, but at least it works now!

Answer 1

From the Cygwin website:
Cygwin is not: a way to run native Linux apps on Windows. You must rebuild your application from source if you want it to run on Windows.
Every applications needs to be rebuilt in order to be use on Windows (as it does not produce an elf file, but .exe file that requires the cygwin dll).
Nevertheless, the shell in cygwin can execute any windows's .exe file (such as ping, ipconfig, cmd, etc.), which is why you are able to run the windows version of PhantomJS under cygwin.

Answer 2

First, download and install Node.js from http://nodejs.org/download
Close and reopen Cygwin and type:
$ npm install -g phantomjs
$ npm install -g casperjs

Answer 3

Just ran into this issue, placing the phantomjs executable in C:/cygwin/bin solved everything. After that all you need to do is run the command C:/cygwin/bin/phantomjs to initialize the application.
Although Cygwin doesn't replace the standard cmd prompt, it is pretty useful!