Is it possible to use Selenium WebDriver to drive PhantomJS?

Question

I’m going through the documentation for the Selenium WebDriver, and it can drive Chrome for example. I was thinking, wouldn't it be far more efficient to ‘drive’ PhantomJS?

Is there a way to use Selenium with PhantomJS?

My intended use would be web scraping: The sites I scrape are loaded with AJAX and lots of lovely JavaScript, and I’m thinking this setup could be a good replacement for the Scrapy Python framework that I’m currently working with.

Answer 1

Since the 1.8 release GhostDriver is included in the stable release of PhantomJS. Here is the exact release notes: http://phantomjs.org/release-1.8.html. You can simply start the PhantomJS process to listen on some port, like this:

phantomjs --webdriver=PORT