Skip to content

php-spider

1,328 1 6 MIT
v0.7.2 (10 Dec 2023) Mar 16 2013 72 (month)

php-spider is a PHP library for web crawling and scraping. It allows developers to easily navigate and extract data from websites by simulating a web browser's behavior.

  • supports two traversal algorithms: breadth-first and depth-first
  • supports crawl depth limiting, queue size limiting and max downloads limiting
  • supports adding custom URI discovery logic, based on XPath, CSS selectors, or plain old PHP
  • comes with a useful set of URI filters, such as Domain limiting
  • supports custom URI filters, both prefetch (URI) and postfetch (Resource content)
  • supports custom request handling logic
  • supports Basic, Digest and NTLM HTTP authentication. See example.
  • comes with a useful set of persistence handlers (memory, file)
  • supports custom persistence handlers
  • collects statistics about the crawl for reporting
  • dispatches useful events, allowing developers to add even more custom behavior
  • supports a politeness policy

This Spider does not support Javascript.

Example Use


use Example\StatsHandler;
use VDB\Spider\Discoverer\XPathExpressionDiscoverer;
use Symfony\Contracts\EventDispatcher\Event;
use VDB\Spider\Event\SpiderEvents;
use VDB\Spider\Spider;

require_once('example_complex_bootstrap.php');

// Create Spider
$spider = new Spider('http://dmoztools.net');

// Add a URI discoverer. Without it, the spider does nothing. In this case, we want <a> tags from a certain <div>
$spider->getDiscovererSet()->set(new XPathExpressionDiscoverer("//div[@id='catalogs']//a"));

// Set some sane options for this example. In this case, we only get the first 10 items from the start page.
$spider->getDiscovererSet()->maxDepth = 1;
$spider->getQueueManager()->maxQueueSize = 10;

// Let's add something to enable us to stop the script
$spider->getDispatcher()->addListener(
    SpiderEvents::SPIDER_CRAWL_USER_STOPPED,
    function (Event $event) {
        echo "\nCrawl aborted by user.\n";
        exit();
    }
);

// Add a listener to collect stats to the Spider and the QueueMananger.
// There are more components that dispatch events you can use.
$statsHandler = new StatsHandler();
$spider->getQueueManager()->getDispatcher()->addSubscriber($statsHandler);
$spider->getDispatcher()->addSubscriber($statsHandler);

// Execute crawl
$spider->crawl();

// Build a report
echo "\n  ENQUEUED:  " . count($statsHandler->getQueued());
echo "\n  SKIPPED:   " . count($statsHandler->getFiltered());
echo "\n  FAILED:    " . count($statsHandler->getFailed());
echo "\n  PERSISTED:    " . count($statsHandler->getPersisted());

// Finally we could do some processing on the downloaded resources
// In this example, we will echo the title of all resources
echo "\n\nDOWNLOADED RESOURCES: ";
foreach ($spider->getDownloader()->getPersistenceHandler() as $resource) {
    echo "\n - " . $resource->getCrawler()->filterXpath('//title')->text();
}

Alternatives / Similar


2,907 v2.1.1 (7 months ago) Jul 17 2018 compare
1,337 v3.2.0 (3 months ago) Dec 27 2021 compare
506 3.0.0 (3 months ago) May 04 2020 compare
311 v1.9.3 (10 days ago) Apr 18 2022 compare

Other Languages

22,459 v2.1.0 (4 years ago) May 14 2018 compare
7,554 v1.3.4 (4 years ago) Feb 15 2020 compare
2,488 2024-05-09 (2 months ago) Jun 06 2019 compare
651 2024-06-25 (20 days ago) Feb 09 2017 compare
51,636 2.11.2 (2 months ago) Jul 26 2019 compare
1,485 1.0.4 (1 year, 10 months ago) Nov 22 2014 compare
5,663 v0.18.0 (1 year, 3 months ago) Aug 06 2019 compare
2,029 (3 years ago) Nov 20 2016 compare
6,650 2.0.1 (20 days ago) Sep 10 2012 compare
2,884 1.4.3 (9 months ago) Sep 04 2013 compare
6,060 1.1.14 (1 year, 11 months ago) Jul 26 2019 compare
795 0.7.1 (5 months ago) Jul 25 2009 compare
1,308 3.0.0 (1 year, 10 months ago) Dec 27 2011 compare
3,048 1.5.0 (5 months ago) Sep 30 2018 compare
153 2.2.4 (3 years ago) Dec 22 2019 compare
240 1.33.0 (4 months ago) Feb 05 2023 compare
3,257 0.9.13 (11 months ago) Jul 04 2017 compare
1,737 0.8.5 (1 year, 10 months ago) Oct 17 2018 compare
10,672 1.1.9 (5 years ago) Aug 24 2018 compare
200 1.0.0-beta8.4 (1 year, 17 days ago) Apr 18 2019 compare
413 0.1.3 (11 months ago) Feb 20 2022 compare
Was this page helpful?