Disclaimer: My use case was fortunate to not require any sudo actions and all the software I needed was pre-installed.

This week, I got a OSX specific ticket for grunt-spritesmith, my images to spritesheet/variables converter. Unfortunately, I develop on Linux Mint and unlike Windows and Linux, there are no free virtual machines for OSX. My options were:

• Buy OSX and use a VM
• Wait until I get my work computer
• Use a VM rental service like MacinCloud
• Try something different

I went with "Try something different", registered a Free account with Sauce Labs, and fired up an Interactive Session for OSX + Google Chrome.

I closed out of Chrome, opened a new Finder window, navigated to /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, and got my bearings.

I tried to install brew but it required sudo priveleges so I went without it.

I discovered that git and node were already installed. The last piece I needed was PhantomJS. For this, I inspected the path, found a non-sudo directory, and installed phantomjs to that directory.

wget http://phantomjs.googlecode.com/files/phantomjs-1.9.2-macosx.zip
unzip phantomjs-1.9.2-macosx.zip
ln -s $PWD/phantomjs-1.9.2-macosx/bin/phantomjs $HOME/.virtualenvs/sauce/bin/phantomjs

After that, I cloned my repository, installed the node modules, and ran the test. I had successfully reproduced the reported issue.

git clone https://github.com/twolfson/phantomjssmith
npm install
npm test
# Error: Command failed: 2013-09-24 01:52:34.353 phantomjs[571:f07] Critical failure: the LastResort font is unavailable.
# 2013-09-24 01:52:34.354 phantomjs[571:f07] Critical failure: the LastResort font is unavailable.

Then, I hacked up the code, found the bug, created a branch on my computer, fetched/tested the branch inside of Sauce Labs, and verified the problem was resolved.

npm test
# > phantomjssmith@0.1.5 test /home/travis/build/twolfson/phantomjssmith
# > doubleshot --timeout 60000
# ․․․․․
# 5 tests complete (10 seconds)