Ghost Driver is a pure JavaScript implementation of the WebDriver Wire Protocol for PhantomJS. It's a Remote WebDriver that uses PhantomJS as back-end.

GhostDriver is designed to be integral part of PhantomJS itself, but it's developed in isolation and progress is tracked by this Repository.

Current version is "1.0.0" (changelog).

The project was created and is lead by Ivan De Marino.

At the moment you need to compile a specific version of PhantomJS to run GhostDriver. This is because GhostDriver needed new features in PhantomJS to fulfill all the functionalities of the WebDriver "protocol". This is only temporary: next version of PhantomJS stable release will include GhostDriver built in.

1. Prepare your machine for building PhantomJS as documented here, then...
2. Add detro remote to local PhantomJS repo: git remote add detro https://github.com/detro/phantomjs.git
3. Checkout the ghostdriver-dev branch: git checkout -b detro-ghostdriver-dev remotes/detro/ghostdriver-dev
4. Build: ./build.sh
5. Go make some coffee (this might take a while...)
6. phantomjs --webdriver=8080 to launch PhantomJS in Remote WebDriver mode

Launching PhantomJS in Remote WebDriver mode it's simple:

$ phantomjs --webdriver=PORT

Once started, you can use any RemoteWebDriver implementation to send commands to it. I advice to take a look to the /test directory for examples.

Here I show how to clone this repo and kick start the (Java) tests. You need Java SDK to run them (I tested it with Java 7, but should work with Java 6 too).

1. git clone https://github.com/detro/ghostdriver.git
2. Configure phantomjs_exec_path inside ghostdriver/test/config.ini to point at the build of PhantomJS you just did
3. cd ghostdriver/test; ./gradlew test

1. phantomjs --webdriver=PORT
2. Configure driver inside ghostdriver/test/config.ini to point at the URL http://localhost:PORT
3. cd ghostdriver/test; ./gradlew test

1. Launch the grid server, which listens on 4444 by default: java -jar /path/to/selenium-server-standalone-2.25.0.jar -role hub
2. Register with the hub: phantomjs --webdriver=8080 --webdriver-selenium-grid-hub=http://127.0.0.1:4444
3. Now you can use your normal webdriver client with http://127.0.0.1:4444 and just request browserName: phantomjs

Here follows the output of the tree command, trimmed of files and "build directories":

.
├── binding
│   └── java
│       ├── jars            <--- JARs containing Binding, related Source and related JavaDoc
│       └── src             <--- Java Binding Source
|
├── src                     <--- GhostDriver JavaScript core source
│   ├── request_handlers    <--- JavaScript "classes/functions" that handle HTTP Requests
│   └── third_party         <--- Third party/utility code
│       └── webdriver-atoms <--- WebDriver Atoms, automatically imported from the Selenium project
|
├── test
│   ├── java
│   │   └── src             <--- Java Tests
│   └── python              <--- Python Tests
|
└── tools                   <--- Tools (import/export)

In April 2012 I (Ivan De Marino) presented GhostDriver at the Selenium Conference: slides and video.

You can contribute by testing GhostDriver, reporting bugs and issues, or submitting Pull Requests. Any help is welcome, but bear in mind the following base principles:

• Issue reporting requires a reproducible example, otherwise will most probably be closed withouth worning
• Squash your commits by theme: I prefer a clean, readable log
• Maintain consistency with the code-style you are surrounded by
• If you are going to make a big, substantial change, let's discuss it first
• I HATE CoffeeScript: assume I'm going to laugh off any "contribution" that contains such aberrating crap!
• Open Source is NOT a democracy (and I mean it!)

GhostDriver is distributed under BSD License.