Is there a headless browser alternative to dryscape or selenium for PHP?

Other Questions Headless Browser
1

I’m tasked with developing a bot for a client that extracts links from an RSS feed and shares them on Google+ through this URL: https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?hl=en&url=http://google.com. The system heavily relies on JavaScript and I’ve previously implemented a solution in C# and Python with just a few lines of code. However, my client insists on using PHP for this project. What alternatives are available since I’m not aware of any PHP libraries similar to dryscape or selenium?

2

For headless browser automation in PHP, you can try using Puppeteer PHP. It's a PHP wrapper for Puppeteer, a popular Node.js library for headless Chrome. This allows for complex JavaScript execution in PHP.


// Puppeteer PHP example
$p = new Puppeteer('http://localhost:3000');
$result = $p->goto('https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?hl=en&url=http://google.com');
echo $result->content();

If you're familiar with using Node.js alongside PHP, this might be a fluent option.

Also, consider Goutte for simpler tasks, though its JS support is limited. Alternatively, leverage headless Chrome via PHP's exec() for executing CLI commands.

3

Hi Alex,

For PHP-based headless browsing, there are a couple of efficient solutions available:

Puppeteer PHP: Although originally for Node.js, you can use PHP wrappers to interact with Puppeteer. This allows you to automate interactions with headless Chrome while running a Node.js service alongside your PHP application. This option offers full JavaScript support, similar to Selenium.


// Puppeteer PHP example
test.php: 
$p = new Puppeteer('http://localhost:3000');
$result = $p->goto('https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?hl=en&url=http://google.com');
echo $result->content();

Goutte: This library is more limited as it is primarily used for web scraping. It handles basic JavaScript but might struggle with complex scenarios.

Headless Chrome via CLI: You can execute headless browser tasks by invoking Chrome directly using PHP's exec() function for simple command-line automation.

In practice, the combination of PHP and a complementary language like Python might streamline heavily JavaScript-reliant tasks, leveraging PHP to call Python scripts for executing complex browser interactions.

Hope this helps in optimizing your workflow effectively!