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confess.js

A small script library that uses PhantomJS to headlessly analyze web pages.

One useful application of this is to enumerate a web app's resources for the purposes of creating a cache manifest file to make your apps run offline. So useful that, right now, that's the only behavior.

For example...

> phantomjs confess.js http://functionsource.com

...will write, to stdout:

CACHE MANIFEST

# This manifest was created by confess.js, http://github.com/jamesgpearce/confess
#
# Time: Wed Apr 13 2011 15:40:27 GMT-0700 (PDT)
#  URL: http://functionsource.com
#   UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/1.1.0 Safari/533.3
#
# Any console output generated by this page or app is shown immediately below. You'll need to remove this to create a valid manifest syntax.
# [Start of console output]
# [End of console output]

CACHE:
/javascripts/lib/jquery.js
/javascripts/lib/underscore.js
/javascripts/lib/backbone.js
/javascripts/lib/view.js
/javascripts/lib/jquery.timeago.js
/javascripts/lib/text-linker.js
/javascripts/templates.js
/javascripts/models/post.js
/javascripts/views/helpers.js
/javascripts/views/application.js
/javascripts/views/mixins.js
/javascripts/views/index.js
http://use.typekit.com/tqz3zpc.js
/stylesheets/vendor-prefix.css
/stylesheets/screen.css
/stylesheets/syntax.css
http://functionsource.com/images/header.png
http://functionsource.com/images/featured.jpg
http://functionsource.com/images/avatars/dion.png
http://functionsource.com/images/avatars/ben.png
http://functionsource.com/images/avatars/kevin.png
http://functionsource.com/images/avatars/ryan.png
http://functionsource.com/images/icons/twitter.png
http://functionsource.com/images/icons/linkedin.png
http://functionsource.com/images/icons/facebook.png
http://functionsource.com/images/icons/rss.png
http://functionsource.com/images/icons/podcast.png
http://functionsource.com/images/icons/firehose.png

NETWORK:
*

You can also set the user-agent header of the request made by PhantomJS to request the page, in case you're serving mobile apps off similar entry-point URLs to your desktop content.

Installation & usage

The one and only dependency is PhantomJS. Install this, and ensure it's all good by trying out some of its example scripts.

Then, assuming phantomjs is on your path, and from the directory containing confess.js, run tasks with:

> phantomjs confess.js URL [UA [TASK]]

Where URL is mandatory, and points to the app you're analyzing. UA is the user-agent you'd like to use, and which defaults to PhantomJS' WebKit string. TASK is the type of analysis you'd like confess.js to perform, but right now it can only be 'manifest', the default.

This loads the page, then searches the DOM (and the CSS) for references to any external resources that the app needs.

The results go to stdout, but of course you can pipe it to a file. If you want to create a cache manifest for an app, this is my be called something like my.appcache:

> phantomjs confess.js http://functionsource.com > my.appcache

You would then need to attach add this file to your app, and reference the manifest in the html element:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html manifest="my.appcache">
    <head>

(And ensure that the manifest file gets emitted from your web server with a content type of text/cache-manifest.)

Note that if your app has any errors, or produces any console output of its own, this will also appear in the upper part of the manifest. You may need to edit the file manually to remove that, otherwise you'll probably end up with an invalid manifest file format. (You might also like to check it against Frederic Hemberger's great cache manifest validator.)