panthervsscrapydweb
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
ScrapydWeb is a web-based management tool for the Scrapyd service. It is built using the Python Flask framework and allows you to easily manage and monitor your Scrapy spider projects through a web interface.
ScrapydWeb allows you to view the status of your running spiders, view the logs of completed spiders, schedule new spider runs, and manage spider settings and configurations.
ScrapydWeb provides a simple way to manage your scraping tasks and allows you to schedule and run multiple spiders simultaneously. It also provides a user-friendly web interface that makes it easy to view the status of your spiders and monitor their progress.
You can install the package via pip by running pip install scrapydweb and then you can run the package by
running scrapydweb command in your command prompt.
It will start a web server that you can access through your web browser at http://localhost:6800/
You will need to have Scrapyd running in order to use ScrapydWeb,
Scrapyd is a service for running Scrapy spiders, it allows you to schedule spiders to run at regular intervals
and also allows you to run spiders on remote machines.
Example Use
<?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!