installing_quickscrape

Installing quickscrape

quickscrape itself is very easy to install. Simply:

sudo npm install --global quickscrape

However, quickscrape depends on several other packages:

• Node.js enables standalone JavaScript apps.
• PhantomJS is a headless browser system that renders websites.
• CasperJS is a wrapper around PhantomJS that allows us to do powerful things with it.
• SpookyJS is a bridge between Node.js and CasperJS.

If you don't already have these installed, you'll need to follow the instructions for your operating system below. Currently we only support OSX and Debian/Ubuntu Linux. If you need instructions for another operating system please create an issue.

OSX

The easiest way to install the dependencies is using a package manager like Homebrew. Currently only Homebrew is supported.

Homebrew

brew update
# get Node.js and PhantomJS
brew install node phantomjs
# we need the latest development version of CasperJS so we use the --devel flag
brew install casperjs --devel
# running npm with sudo makes it confused, but it's necessary to get
# global access to the installed quickscrape command. This setting
# prevents npm from crashing during install
env SUDO_UID= SUDO_USER= npm i

Then you can install quickscrape:

sudo npm install --global quickscrape

Debian / Ubuntu

The dependencies can be somewhat tricky to install manually on Debian/Ubuntu, so we've made an install script that you can run easily:

curl -sSL http://git.io/MN9b2A | sudo bash

If you'd like to run the steps yourself, see this gist.