Sunscraper

Sunscraper is a gem for prerendering pages with hashbang URLs like http://whatever.com/#!/page.

It works by loading content in the embedded web browser and waiting for a JavaScript method to be called.

HTML = %{
<html>
<head>
  <script type="text/javascript">
  document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() {
    document.getElementById('fuga').textContent =
              ("!skrow tI").split("").reverse().join("");
    Sunscraper.finish();
  }, true);
  </script>
</head>
<body>
  <div id='fuga'></div>
</body>
</html>
}

Sunscraper.scrape_html(HTML).include?('It works!') # => true

See also documentation.

Installation

Sunscraper requires Qt 4.x and QtWebkit packages to be installed on the target system. Sunscraper is not a Ruby C extension; it works by building a Qt shared library and loading it through FFI.

gem install sunscraper

Runtime requirements

On Linux, Sunscraper requires a running X server and a valid DISPLAY environment variable. Consider using Xvfb on a GUI-less production server.

Compatibility

Travis CI

Sunscraper should be compatible across all major implementations on all major operating systems, including Ruby MRI 1.9, JRuby, Rubinius and MacRuby running on GNU/Linux, OS X and Windows.

JRuby versions up to 1.6.5 are known not to work due to a bug in its FFI library.

Ruby MRI 1.8 is not supported because it has a braindead threading model and will never be because I don't care.

Thread safety

Sunscraper is thread-safe.

License

Copyright (C) 2011 by Peter Zotov <[email protected]>.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.