playwrightvspanther
Playwright is a Node.js library that provides a high-level API to automate web browsers. It allows you to automate browser tasks such as generating screenshots, creating PDFs, and testing web pages by simulating user interactions. Playwright is similar to Puppeteer, but it supports more browsers and it also provide capabilities for automation of browser like Microsoft Edge and Safari.
Playwright is commonly used for web scraping, end-to-end testing, and browser automation.
Playwright is a spiritual successor to Puppeter and is available in more languages and has access to more browser types.
Panther is a convenient standalone library to scrape websites and to run end-to-end tests using real browsers.
Panther is super powerful. It leverages the W3C's WebDriver protocol to drive native web browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox.
Panther is very easy to use, because it implements Symfony's popular BrowserKit and DomCrawler APIs, and contains all the features you need to test your apps. It will sound familiar if you have ever created a functional test for a Symfony app: as the API is exactly the same! Keep in mind that Panther can be used in every PHP project, as it is a standalone library.
Panther automatically finds your local installation of Chrome or Firefox and launches them, so you don't need to install anything else on your computer, a Selenium server is not needed!
In test mode, Panther automatically starts your application using the PHP built-in web-server. You can focus on writing your tests or web-scraping scenario and Panther will take care of everything else.
Features:
- executes the JavaScript code contained in webpages
- supports everything that Chrome (or Firefox) implements
- allows taking screenshots
- can wait for asynchronously loaded elements to show up
- lets you run your own JS code or XPath queries in the context of the loaded page
- supports custom Selenium server installations
- supports remote browser testing services including SauceLabs and BrowserStack
Example Use
const { chromium } = require('playwright');
(async () => {
const browser = await chromium.launch();
const context = await browser.newContext();
const page = await context.newPage();
await page.goto('https://www.example.com/form');
// fill in the form
await page.fill('input[name="name"]', 'John Doe');
await page.fill('input[name="email"]', 'johndoe@example.com');
await page.selectOption('select[name="country"]', 'US');
// submit the form
await page.click('button[type="submit"]');
// wait for the page to load after the form is submitted
await page.waitForNavigation();
// take a screenshot
await page.screenshot({path: 'form-submission.png'});
await browser.close();
})();
<?php
use Symfony\Component\Panther\Client;
require __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php'; // Composer's autoloader
$client = Client::createChromeClient();
// Or, if you care about the open web and prefer to use Firefox
$client = Client::createFirefoxClient();
$client->request('GET', 'https://api-platform.com'); // Yes, this website is 100% written in JavaScript
$client->clickLink('Get started');
// Wait for an element to be present in the DOM (even if hidden)
$crawler = $client->waitFor('#installing-the-framework');
// Alternatively, wait for an element to be visible
$crawler = $client->waitForVisibility('#installing-the-framework');
echo $crawler->filter('#installing-the-framework')->text();
$client->takeScreenshot('screen.png'); // Yeah, screenshot!