Installation

SlimerJS runs on any platform on which Firefox or XulRunner is available. XulRunner is the core of Firefox without its user interface.

Installation of SlimerJS

To install SlimerJS, you need to download its package. Three flavors:

• Install the linux package from the package system of your linux distribution. It will install automatically all needed packages (like XulRunner or Firefox). It seems that only Arch Linux provides a package of SlimerJS for the moment. Feel free to contribute for your favorite distro!
• Or download the Standalone Edition of SlimerJS: this is a zip/gz package containing SlimerJS and XulRunner. There is a package for each operating system.
• Or download the Lightweight Edition of SlimerJS: this is a zip package containing only SlimerJS and for all operating system. You have to install Firefox or XulRunner separately and probably you’ll need to set an environment variable. This is the prefered way to save network band width or to use different versions of Gecko.

From Arch Linux

A package is available for Arch Linux, thanks to a contributor. So if you use Arch Linux just type in a terminal:

yaourt slimerjs

It will install all needed packages. You’re ready to use SlimerJS. You can jump to the Lauching SlimerJS section.

The Standalone Edition

Download the zip or the gz package of SlimerJS from the web site and extract files into a directory somewhere on your disk. You’ll have a slimerjs/ directory with some files. Everything is here. You’re ready to use SlimerJS. Go to the Lauching SlimerJS section.

The Lightweight Edition

Download the zip package of SlimerJS from the web site and extract files into a directory somewhere on your disk. You’ll have a slimerjs/ directory with some files.

Then you need to install Firefox or XulRunner if it is not already done.

• Download Firefox (version 22 or higher)
• or Download Xulrunner (version 22 or higher) XulRunner is lighter than Firefox although it contains exactely the same web engine as Firefox.

To finish the installation, you probably should read the following section before launching SlimerJS.

Configuring SlimerJS

During its launch, SlimerJS tries to discover itself the path of Firefox or XulRunner. This is not a problem for the Standalone edition or linux packages.

In case it fails (this could be the case for the lightweight edition), or if you want to launch SlimerJS with a specific version of Firefox, you should create an environment variable containing the path of the Firefox/XulRunner binary. To create this environment variable from a command line:

• On linux:

  export SLIMERJSLAUNCHER=/usr/bin/firefox
  

• on Windows

  SET SLIMERJSLAUNCHER="c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
  

• On windows with cygwin

  export SLIMERJSLAUNCHER="/cygdrive/c/program files/mozilla firefox/firefox.exe"
  

• On MacOS

  export SLIMERJSLAUNCHER=/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox
  

You can of course set this variable in your .bashrc, .profile or in the computer properties on Windows.

Launching SlimerJS

From a command line, call the slimerjs executable (or slimerjs.bat for Windows) with the path of a javascript file.

/somewhere/slimerjs-1.2.3/slimerjs myscript.js

On Windows:

c:\somewhere\slimerjs-1.2.3\slimerjs.bat myscript.js

The js script should contain your instructions to manipulate a web page...

You can indicate several options on the command line. See the “configuration” chapter.

Having a headless SlimerJS

There is a tool called xvfb, available on Linux and MacOS. It allows to launch any “graphical” programs without the need of an X-Windows environment. Windows of the application won’t be shown and will be drawn only in memory.

Install it from your prefered repository (sudo apt-get install xvfb with debian/ubuntu).

Then launch SlimerJS like this:

xvfb-run ./slimerjs myscript.js

You won’t see any windows. If you have any problems with xvfb, see its documentation.