jsdom

jsdom is a pure-JavaScript implementation of many web standards, notably the WHATWG DOM and HTML Standards, for use with Node.js. In general, the goal of the project is to emulate enough of a subset of a web browser to be useful for testing and scraping real-world web applications.

The latest versions of jsdom require Node.js v18 or newer. (Versions of jsdom below v23 still work with previous Node.js versions, but are unsupported.)

Basic usage

const jsdom = require("jsdom");
const { JSDOM } = jsdom;

To use jsdom, you will primarily use the JSDOM constructor, which is a named export of the jsdom main module. Pass the constructor a string. You will get back a JSDOM object, which has a number of useful properties, notably window:

const dom = new JSDOM(`<p>Hello world</p>`);
console.log(dom.window.document.querySelector("p").textContent); // "Hello world"

(Note that jsdom will parse the HTML you pass it just like a browser does, including implied , , and `` tags.)

The resulting object is an instance of the JSDOM class, which contains a number of useful properties and methods besides window. In general, it can be used to act on the jsdom from the "outside," doing things that are not possible with the normal DOM APIs. For simple cases, where you don't need any of this functionality, we recommend a coding pattern like

const { window } = new JSDOM(`...`);
// or even
const { document } = (new JSDOM(`...`)).window;

Full documentation on everything you can do with the JSDOM class is below, in the section "JSDOM Object API".

Customizing jsdom

The JSDOM constructor accepts a second parameter which can be used to customize your jsdom in the following ways.

Simple options

const dom = new JSDOM(``, {
  url: "https://example.org/",
  referrer: "https://example.com/",
  contentType: "text/html",
  includeNodeLocations: true,
  storageQuota: 10000000
});

• url sets the value returned by window.location, document.URL, and document.documentURI, and affects things like resolution of relative URLs within the document and the same-origin restrictions and referrer used while fetching subresources. It defaults to "about:blank".
• referrer just affects the value read from document.referrer. It defaults to no referrer (which reflects as the empty string).
• contentType affects the value read from document.contentType, as well as how the document is parsed: as HTML or as XML. Values that are not a HTML MIME type or an XML MIME type will throw. It defaults to "text/html". If a charset parameter is present, it can affect binary data processing.
• includeNodeLocations preserves the location info produced by the HTML parser, allowing you to retrieve it with the nodeLocation() method (described below). It also ensures that line numbers reported in exception stack traces for code running inside );

// The script will not be executed, by default: console.log(dom.window.document.getElementById("content").children.length); // 0

To enable executing scripts inside the page, you can use the `runScripts: "dangerously"` option:

```js
const dom = new JSDOM(`
  <div id="content"></div>
  
`, { runScripts: "dangerously" });

// The script will be executed and modify the DOM:
console.log(dom.window.document.getElementById("content").children.length); // 1

Again we emphasize to only use this when feeding jsdom code you know is safe. If you use it on arbitrary user-supplied code, or code from the Internet, you are effectively running untrusted Node.js code, and your machine could be compromised.

If you want to execute external scripts, included via , { runScripts: "outside-only" });

// run a script outside of JSDOM: dom.window.eval('document.getElementById("content").append(document.createElement("p"));');

console.log(dom.window.document.getElementById("content").children.length); // 1 console.log(dom.window.document.getElementsByTagName("hr").length); // 0 console.log(dom.window.document.getElementsByTagName("p").length); // 1

This is turned off by default for performance reasons, but is safe to enable.

Note that in the default configuration, without setting `runScripts`, the values of `window.Array`, `window.eval`, etc. will be the same as those provided by the outer Node.js environment. That is, `window.eval === eval` will hold, so `window.eval` will not run scripts in a useful way.

We strongly advise against trying to "execute scripts" by mashing together the jsdom and Node global environments (e.g. by doing `global.window = dom.window`), and then executing scripts or test code inside the Node global environment. Instead, you should treat jsdom like you would a browser, and run all scripts and tests that need access to a DOM inside the jsdom environment, using `window.eval` or `runScripts: "dangerously"`. This might require, for example, creating a browserify bundle to execute as a `

If you do not control the page, you could try workarounds such as polling for the presence of a specific element.

For more details, see the discussion in #640, especially @matthewkastor's insightful comment.

Unimplemented parts of the web platform

Although we enjoy adding new features to jsdom and keeping it up to date with the latest web specs, it has many missing APIs. Please feel free to file an issue for anything missing, but we're a small and busy team, so a pull request might work even better.

Some features of jsdom are provided by our dependencies. Notable documentation in that regard includes the list of supported CSS selectors for our CSS selector engine, nwsapi.

Beyond just features that we haven't gotten to yet, there are two major features that are currently outside the scope of jsdom. These are:

• Navigation: the ability to change the global object, and all other objects, when clicking a link or assigning location.href or similar.
• Layout: the ability to calculate where elements will be visually laid out as a result of CSS, which impacts methods like getBoundingClientRects() or properties like offsetTop.

Currently jsdom has dummy behaviors for some aspects of these features, such as sending a "not implemented" "jsdomError" to the virtual console for navigation, or returning zeros for many layout-related properties. Often you can work around these limitations in your code, e.g. by creating new JSDOM instances for each page you "navigate" to during a crawl, or using Object.defineProperty() to change what various layout-related getters and methods return.

Note that other tools in the same space, such as PhantomJS, do support these features. On the wiki, we have a more complete writeup about jsdom vs. PhantomJS.

Supporting jsdom

jsdom is a community-driven project maintained by a team of volunteers. You could support jsdom by:

• Getting professional support for jsdom as part of a Tidelift subscription. Tidelift helps making open source sustainable for us while giving teams assurances for maintenance, licensing, and security.
• Contributing directly to the project.

Getting help

If you need help with jsdom, please feel free to use any of the following venues:

• The mailing list (best for "how do I" questions)
• The issue tracker (best for bug reports)
• The Matrix room: #jsdom:matrix.org