server side browser

Question

I was wondering if it is possible to run a browser (specifically a browser engine) on the server side. I do not just mean to render a page but to keep a browser open for some ti

Answer 1

PhantomJS does what you are describing. It is basically a headless browser - http://phantomjs.org/

you can run it server side via any server side language. See some integration modules below for NodeJS and PHP

NodeJS

https://npmjs.org/package/node-phantom

https://github.com/sgentle/phantomjs-node

PHP

https://github.com/diggin/php-PhantomjsRunner

Answer 2

Yes, it it very possible to run a web browser on a server. Ubuntu Server, for example can run firefox by simply installing firefox and xserver.

$ sudo apt-get install firefox
$ sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg

Then to get firefox running type:

$ X

This will leave you with a blank screen because there are no applications running on the display yet. You need to shift back to a new terminal with Ctrl-Alt-F2. Ctrl-Alt-F1 holds the X process now.

Login to the new terminal and set the environment’s display variable to :0 and launch firefox.

$ export DISPLAY=:0
$ firefox &

Firefox should now be running, but you'll notice it's got some quirks to it. If you decide that you want to go forward with this you should install a window manager. I'd go with a lightweight tiling window manager and run firefox and whatever other applications need graphical output within that window manager.