I’ve been working with the Hound library for browser automation in my Elixir project and it’s working great so far. I can run basic tests and navigate to different pages without issues.
Right now I’m using PhantomJS in remote WebDriver mode by starting it with phantomjs --webdriver=9515 and setting config :hound, driver: "phantomjs" in my config file.
I have two specific configuration needs that I can’t figure out:
First issue: I need to modify the User Agent string for my requests. When I check the session info, I can see the default user agent but I want to change it to something custom. Is there a way to configure this through Hound’s settings?
Second issue: My tests need to run through HTTP proxies that require authentication. I know how to set this up when running PhantomJS directly from command line, but I’m not sure where to configure proxy settings when using Hound as the interface.
Has anyone dealt with these configuration challenges before? Any guidance on where these settings should be defined would be really helpful.
phantomjs is pretty quirky with proxy settings. try passing the args directly when you start it: --proxy=your-proxy:port --proxy-auth=user:pass. for user agent, i set it in the webdriver capabilities instead of configuring through hound. chrome headless might be easier if u can switch drivers.
I encountered similar challenges with Hound last year during a web scraping project. Unfortunately, you can’t directly set these settings within PhantomJS itself; instead, you need to specify them through Hound’s desired capabilities. For changing the user agent, you can adjust it in your test configuration when starting a session by using phantomjs.page.settings.userAgent. As for the proxy authentication, it can be quite tricky with PhantomJS due to its limited support for such features. I ended up switching to ChromeDriver, which provided much better support for proxy settings. If you’re required to use PhantomJS, consider implementing proxy management at your application level, or employ a local proxy that handles authentication for you. Ensure that you properly define all settings in your Hound.start_session call to avoid silent failures caused by incorrectly formatted capabilities.
I’m dealing with legacy PhantomJS too. The trick is tweaking webdriver capabilities before you start the session. Add your desired capabilities hash when setting up Hound - you’ll want to hit phantomjs.page.settings for user agent stuff. For proxy auth, I’ve had way better luck writing a custom PhantomJS script that handles proxy config internally instead of trying to push it through Hound’s interface. The auth piece is a real pain since PhantomJS struggles with HTTP auth using standard webdriver commands. I’d suggest making a wrapper script that sets your proxy credentials before firing up the webdriver endpoint. It gives you way more control over connection settings without wrestling with Hound’s abstraction layer.