

Ask HN: Headless broswers – use cases? - qute

what might be interesting use cases for headless browsers like Ghost or PhantonJS, except for running tests?
======
jschrf
Crawling pages is probably one of the most common use cases, I would imagine.

I use PhantomJS and SlimerJS to host CLI tools written in
TypeScript/JavaScript. I also run these tools in the browser because I find it
a better debugging experience than remote debugging.

There's a lot of functionality available through NPM and writing tools and
scripts in TS can be very productive and easy to cobble things together - even
advanced things.

------
andrewchambers
I used it for logging into my bank's crappy web interface and dumping my
financial data as csv. It required javascript and has no api available.

This was so I could convert the data from multiple accounts to
[http://www.ledger-cli.org/](http://www.ledger-cli.org/) format automatically.

------
mtmail
Crawling webpages. I needed to find out if a product price is actually visible
to users. PhantomJS executes JS and CSS and I can execute a Javascript query
to check.

