How do I get PhantomJS / CasperJS working on 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!

Assuming you properly have the file C:\cygwin\bin\phantomjs.exe, try to invoke it with full path to the file. — Ariya Hidayat
Also forget the pip install approach to install PhantomJS. That's a completely wrong way to install it. — Ariya Hidayat
Thanks for the advice on pip install. When I try to run phantomjs with the full path, I still get the same error: cannot execute binary file — Teja K
Although Cygwin allows you to run an environment that is very Unix-like, it does not mean that it can run binaries from other operating systems. — Ariya Hidayat

Uman Uman · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-30T10:23:14

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.

How do I get PhantomJS / CasperJS working on Cygwin?

3 Answers