Is it possible to do a complete, clean, uninstall of Phantom JS after it has been compiled in place?

Question

I’ve just built and compiled PhantomJS for use on a Raspberry Pi.

To do this, I cloned the GitHub repository, than used a build.sh command that—after 5 hours—has generated few executables, copied or moved other few files, and so on.

I think build is not 100% successful, so I’d like to restart.

I there a way to undo a PhantomJS build?

Solution

It seems that PhantomJS—by default—doesn’t install it’s files anywhere outside of it’s build directory. According to the official PhantomJS documentation on building the software:

This produces a statically built bin/phantomjs. This is a self-contained executable, it can be moved to a different directory or another machine.

Which means that if you did a git clone of the source software to a directory named phantomjs/ and then ran ./build.sh in that directory, you can just remove the bin/ directory in phantomjs/. Or just get rid of the whole phantomjs/ directory and pull a new git clone to attempt to build it again.

But honestly, when I recently faced the task of installing PhantomJS on Ubuntu 12.04, I winced at the idea of dealing with source code build taking hours to compile. So I installed PhantomJS via NPM (Node Package Manager)—which is a part of NodeJS instead. This gives you a nice, clean, already “built” version of PhantomJS in minutes instead of waiting hours for the build/compile to manually finish.

This is how I did it in Ubuntu 12.04:

First, install Node.js and NPM (Node Package Manager)

Install python-software-properties like this:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

Next add the NodeSource PPA repository to the system like this:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup | sudo bash -

With that done, run aptitude update like this:

sudo aptitude update

And now, install Node.js and NPM like this:

sudo aptitude install nodejs

Now NodeJS and NPM will be installed. You can check the versions by running the following commands:

nodejs --version
npm --version

The returned versions should be v0.10.33 for NodeJS and 1.4.28 for NPM.

Next, install PhantomJS via NPM (Node Package Manager)

Now install PhantomJS via NPM like this:

sudo npm install -g phantomjs

Or use this variant of the command which uses phantomjs-prebuilt if you find phantomjs to be depreciated when you run the NPM command:

sudo npm install -g phantomjs-prebuilt

After it installs check the version by running this command:

phantomjs --version

The version number should be something like 1.9.8.

If that somehow fails, then set the NPM registry like this:

npm config set registry http://registry.npmjs.org/

And if there are SSL issues connecting to the NPM repository, disable the strict SSL settings:

npm config set strict-ssl false

Once that’s all done, you will have PhantomJS installed successfully via NPM.

UPDATE: The original poster indicates that they are compiling PhantomJS for use on a Raspberry Pi. If that is the case, one can install NodeJS and NPM on a Raspberry Pi via the methods explained here as well as here.

Comments

[realtebo]

Super answer, thanks. But my Linux is, for precision because I omitted this info, a raspberry pi. So there is no legacy binary package on node package repository usefull for my little friend.

[Giacomo1968]

You can install NodeJS and NPM on a Raspberry Pi. Clearly explained here as well as here.

[realtebo]

But I cannot install phantomJs using npm. Has some strange errors about using phantomJs as a dependency of phantomJs itselfs

[maxime1992]

Small update, phantomjs is now deprecated with npm so you should rather install npm install -g phantomjs-prebuilt

[Giacomo1968]

@Maxime Thanks for the tip! Just updated the answer.