Facebook OG Meta with Angular and Node

Question

I am trying to get my angular / node application to render dynamic Open graph meta content.

I have been trying to follow this tutorial http://www.codewarmer.com/posts/1394433236-configuring-angularjs-nodejs-for-search-bots#!

I am having some problems with phantom working with node, my issue seems to be similar to this Error message when using PhantomJS, breaks at random intervals

except that my error does not happen at random intervals, it happens all the time.

EDIT: Here is my code

In my server.js I require a module i created based on the above tut called PhantomHandler.js and it is called like so.

var crawler = require('./modules/PhantomHandler');

This is what PhantomHandler.js looks like:

    var phantom = require('phantom');
var models = require('../models');

mongoose = require('mongoose');
Snapshot = models.Snapshot;

url = require('url');
var baseUrl = 'my url';

function crawlSite(idx, arr, page, callback) {
    crawlUrl(arr[idx], page, function(data) {
        data.links.forEach(function(link) {
            if (arr.indexOf(link) < 0)
                arr.push(link);
        });
        Snapshot.upsert(data);

        if (++idx === arr.length)
            callback();
        else
            crawlSite(idx, arr, page, callback);
    });
}

function startPhantom(cb) {
    phantom.create(function(ph) {
        phInstance = ph;
        ph.createPage(function(page) {
            phPage = page;
            cb(ph, page);
        });
    });
}

function crawlUrl(path, page, cb) {
    uri = url.resolve(baseUrl, path);

    page.open(uri, function(status) {
        var evaluateCb = function(result) {
            result.path = path;
            cb(result);
        };
        //Timeout 2000ms seems pretty enough for majority ajax apps
        setTimeout(function() {
            if (status == 'success')
                page.evaluate(function() {
                    var linkTags = document.querySelectorAll('a:not([rel="nofollow"])');
                    var links = [];
                    for (var i = 0, ln; ln = linkTags[i]; i++)
                        links.push(ln.getAttribute('href'));

                    return {
                        'links': links,
                        'html': document.documentElement.outerHTML
                    };
                }, evaluateCb);
        }, 2000);
    });
}

exports.crawlAll = function(callback) {
    startPhantom(function(ph, page) {
        crawlSite(0, ['/'], page, function() {
            ph.exit();
            callback();
        });
    });
};

exports.crawlOne = function(path, callback) {
    startPhantom(function(ph, page) {
        crawlUrl(path, page, function(data) {
            Snapshot.upsert(data);
            ph.exit();
            callback();
        });
    });
};

When i run this code my exact error is:

    phantom stderr: 'phantomjs' is not recognized as an internal or exte
,
operable program or batch file.


assert.js:92
  throw new assert.AssertionError({
        ^
AssertionError: abnormal phantomjs exit code: 1
    at Console.assert (console.js:102:23)
    at ChildProcess.<anonymous> (path to node modules\node_modules\phantom\phantom.js:150:28)
    at ChildProcess.emit (events.js:98:17)
    at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (child_process.js:809:12)

My question: Is this the best easiest way to go about getting angular to play nicely with Facebook OG? If it is can anyone else confirm if they have managed to get this technique to work with out phantom throwing an assertion error as described above.

It seems like this should be a relatively common job and I am surprised that I haven't found a nice straight forward tutorial on how to get this to work, unless i just haven't looked properly :s

Thanks

Answer 1

Okay,

Because my question was essentially "What is the best way to get angular and node to respond to Facebook with the correct page meta". I am now in a position to post my answer to this.

1. As stated above I think that using the phantom.js method described above requires phantom to be installed and to run as a separate process on the node.js server. (Can anyone confirm or deny this?)

2. For my situation I just wanted a user to be able to post a link from the site onto Facebook and for Facebook to return a nice looking link using open graph meta.

With that in mind I decided to skip the phantom.js step from the solution in the tutorial above. Instead I rolled some code which essentially saves an HTML snippet into the DB when a user hits a page. The HTML snippet just contains the meta tags I need for Facebook. I then use the last part of the above tutorial to direct Facebook bots to my saved HTML snippet.

It seems to work pretty well.