Running electron (atom-shell) headlessly on linux server through Nightmare.js

Question

I am building a scraper to make JS single page applications easily crawlable.

After some incredible frustration with PhantomJS (memory leaks, outdated webkit, undead processes, among many other problems) I decided to switch to NightmareJS which can do the same things but uses Electron under the hood. Electron has a lot of advantages (uses latest chromium, is a lot faster) but it needs an X server to run.

As I need to make it work under ubuntu server, I followed this gist . Now I have a great EC2 instance with everything ready to run an headless electron

xvfb-run electron

The point is that I need to run this through nightmareJS (which I will use in a node.js server script). I was wondering how I could pass parameters to nightmare in order to start electron through svfb

Elizabethelizabethan

You probably should ask this in the Nightmare issue tracker on GitHub. The move to electron is pretty new and I don't know if the developers frequent Stack Overflow. – Extern

The link to the gist is broken. I need this... – Epicedium

Answer 1

I don't know if there is a better way, but at least for my works run the main process using xvfb-run command:

$ xvfb-run node --harmony simple-service.js
Worker 12153 is online
Worker 12155 is online
Worker 12154 is online
Worker 12156 is online

Lichen

Will multiple instances of Nightmare work when running it like this? – Samoyedic