Testing from the Command Line with PhantomJS

I learned about the PhantomJS project recently and thought that it would be a good fit for dygraphs.

Our current testing setup involves several steps:

1. Start a jstd server from the command line.
   
2. Visit the server in the browser that you want to test.
   
3. Run the jstd command with "--tests all" set.
   
4. Tear everything down.
   

That's not too bad, but there is enough overhead that we don't run tests as frequently as we should. Case in point: I broke one of our tests nine days ago, but didn't realize it until this morning.

With phantomjs, this process is streamlined. You can do everything from the command line:

$ ./test.sh
Ran 118 tests in 1.397s.
118 test(s) passed
0 test(s) failed:
PASS

Phantom creates a headless web browser using WebKit. You drive the browser using JavaScript, and can execute commands in the context of any web page. I'm excited that it's working so well for dygraphs. No we'll have no excuses for not running auto_tests!