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Can you deploy Watir on Heroku to generate HTML Snapshots? If so, how?


I would like to generate HTML Snapshots using Watir, hosted on Heroku.

Google's Full Specification for Making AJAX Applications Crawlable suggests using HTMLUnit... see How do I create an HTML snapshot? point #3.

HtmlUnit is a Java-only headless browser emulator; and unfortunately jRuby is not an option on Heroku. So HtmlUnit is ruled out (to my knowledge).

If you're interested I have another question open regarding HtmlUnit as a service hosted on Google App Engine... Making AJAX Applications Crawlable? How to build a simple web service on Google App Engine to produce HTML Snapshots? ... still waiting on a proven example/answer.


Solution

  • No. You need a full desktop environment to run watir. Heroku doesn't provide you with that.

    You could use a service such as Amazon EC2