PHP headless browser automation tools - alternatives to Selenium or PhantomJS?

Other Questions Headless Browser
1

I need to create a PHP script that can interact with JavaScript-heavy web pages. My project involves reading URLs from an RSS feed and then automating interactions on a Google+ sharing page. The target page uses heavy JavaScript and doesn’t have simple forms to submit.

<?php
// Example of what I'm trying to achieve
$feedUrls = getRSSLinks('example-feed.xml');
foreach($feedUrls as $linkUrl) {
    $targetPage = 'https://plus.google.com/share?url=' . urlencode($linkUrl);
    // Need to automate JS interactions here
    automatePageInteraction($targetPage);
}
?>

I’ve successfully built similar automation in C# and Python using browser automation tools, but now I need a PHP solution. The page relies heavily on JavaScript execution, so simple curl requests won’t work. Are there any PHP libraries that can handle headless browser automation similar to what Selenium does for other languages?

2

Hit the same issue 6 months back with automated social media posting. php-webdriver saved me - it’s the official PHP bindings for Selenium WebDriver. Skip the full Selenium grid, just grab ChromeDriver locally and run headless. Pretty simple syntax once you get the hang of it. Way more reliable than the newer Chrome DevTools wrappers, especially with Google+'s crazy JavaScript stuff. Watch your memory though - large RSS feeds will eat it up fast. Close browser sessions properly and batch your requests. Docs suck but the community will bail you out.

3

I’ve been using Roach for this stuff and it handles JavaScript really well. It’s a PHP web scraping framework that runs JavaScript through headless Chrome. Setup’s easy with Composer and the API’s clean for dynamic content. Another solid option is Goutte with Panther - Panther uses ChromeDriver and works great with Symfony’s BrowserKit. For Google+ sharing, Panther’s your best bet since it handles complex JavaScript and form submissions without issues. Biggest win is you get familiar PHP syntax but with full browser automation. Performance has been solid too - I’ve processed tons of URLs from feeds without memory problems.

4

hey, ya might want to check out chrome-php/chrome. it’s a wrapper for the Chrome DevTools Protocol in PHP. I’ve had good luck with it for JS-heavy pages, and it’s a breeze to install via composer—no messy Selenium servers to set up!