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Chrome PHP

This library lets you start playing with chrome/chromium in headless mode from PHP.

Can be used synchronously and asynchronously!

Features

• Open Chrome or Chromium browser from php
• Create pages and navigate to pages
• Take screenshots
• Evaluate javascript on the page
• Make PDF
• Emulate mouse
• Emulate keyboard
• Always IDE friendly

Happy browsing!

Requirements

Requires PHP 7.4-8.3 and a Chrome/Chromium 65+ executable.

Note that the library is only tested on Linux but is compatible with macOS and Windows.

Installation

The library can be installed with Composer and is available on packagist under chrome-php/chrome:

Usage

It uses a simple and understandable API to start Chrome, to open pages, take screenshots, crawl websites... and almost everything that you can do with Chrome as a human.

Using different Chrome executable

When starting, the factory will look for the environment variable "CHROME_PATH" to use as the Chrome executable. If the variable is not found, it will try to guess the correct executable path according to your OS or use "chrome" as the default.

You are also able to explicitly set up any executable of your choice when creating a new object. For instance "chromium-browser":

Debugging

The following example disables headless mode to ease debugging

Other debug options:

About debugLogger: this can be any of a resource string, a resource, or an object implementing LoggerInterface from Psr\Log (such as monolog or apix/log).

API

Browser Factory

Options set directly in the createBrowser method will be used only for a single browser creation. The default options will be ignored.

Options set using the setOptions and addOptions methods will persist.

Available options

Here are the options available for the browser factory:

Persistent Browser

This example shows how to share a single instance of Chrome for multiple scripts.

The first time the script is started we use the browser factory in order to start Chrome, afterwards we save the uri to connect to this browser in the file system.

The next calls to the script will read the uri from that file in order to connect to the Chrome instance instead of creating a new one. If Chrome was closed or crashed, a new instance is started again.

Browser API

Create a new page (tab)

Get opened pages (tabs)

Close the browser

Set a script to evaluate before every page created by this browser will navigate

Page API

Navigate to an URL

When using $navigation->waitForNavigation() you will wait for 30sec until the page event "loaded" is triggered. You can change the timeout or the event to listen for:

Available events (in the order they trigger):

• Page::DOM_CONTENT_LOADED: dom has completely loaded
• Page::FIRST_CONTENTFUL_PAINT: triggered when the first non-white content element is painted on the screen
• Page::FIRST_IMAGE_PAINT: triggered when the first image is painted on the screen
• Page::FIRST_MEANINGFUL_PAINT: triggered when the primary content of a page is visible to the user
• Page::FIRST_PAINT: triggered when any pixel on the screen is painted, including the browser's default background color
• Page::INIT: connection to DevTools protocol is initialized
• Page::INTERACTIVE_TIME: scripts have finished loading and the main thread is no longer blocked by rendering or other tasks
• Page::LOAD: (default) page and all resources are loaded
• Page::NETWORK_IDLE: page has loaded, and no network activity has occurred for at least 500ms

When you want to wait for the page to navigate 2 main issues may occur. First, the page is too long to load and second, the page you were waiting to be loaded has been replaced. The good news is that you can handle those issues using a good old try-catch:

Evaluate script on the page

Once the page has completed the navigation you can evaluate arbitrary script on this page:

Sometimes the script you evaluate will click a link or submit a form, in this case, the page will reload and you will want to wait for the new page to reload.

You can achieve this by using $page->evaluate('some js that will reload the page')->waitForPageReload(). An example is available in form-submit.php

Call a function

This is an alternative to evaluate that allows calling a given function with the given arguments in the page context:

Add a script tag

That's useful if you want to add jQuery (or anything else) to the page:

You can also use an URL to feed the src attribute:

Set the page HTML

You can manually inject html to a page using the method.

When a page's HTML is updated, we'll wait for the page to unload. You can specify how long to wait and which event to wait for through two optional parameters. This defaults to 3000ms and the "load" event.

Note that this method will not append to the current page HTML, it will completely replace it.

Get the page HTML

You can get the page HTML as a string using the method.

Add a script to evaluate upon page navigation

If your script needs the dom to be fully populated before it runs then you can use the option "onLoad":

Set viewport size

This feature allows changing the size of the viewport (emulation) for the current page without affecting the size of all the browser's pages (see also option "windowSize" of BrowserFactory::createBrowser).

Make a screenshot

Screenshot an area on a page

You can use the option "clip" to choose an area on a page for the screenshot

Full-page screenshot

You can also take a screenshot for the full-page layout (not only the viewport) using $page->getFullPageClip with attribute captureBeyondViewport = true

Print as PDF

Options headerTemplate and footerTemplate:

Should be valid HTML markup with the following classes used to inject printing values into them:

• date: formatted print date
• title: document title
• url: document location
• pageNumber: current page number
• totalPages: total pages in the document

Save downloads

You can set the path to save downloaded files.

Mouse API

The mouse API is dependent on the page instance and allows you to control the mouse's moves, clicks and scroll.

You can emulate the mouse wheel to scroll up and down in a page, frame, or element.

Finding elements

The find method will search for elements using querySelector and move the cursor to a random position over it.

This method will attempt to scroll right and down to bring the element to the visible screen. If the element is inside an internal scrollable section, try moving the mouse to inside that section first.

Keyboard API

The keyboard API is dependent on the page instance and allows you to type like a real user.

To impersonate a real user you may want to add a delay between each keystroke using the method:

Key combinations

The methods press, type, and release can be used to send key combinations such as ctrl + v.

You can press the same key several times in sequence, this is the equivalent to a user pressing and holding the key. The release event, however, will be sent only once per key.

Key aliases

Cookie API

You can set and get cookies for a page:

Set Cookie

Get Cookies

Set user agent

You can set up a user-agent per page:

See also BrowserFactory option userAgent to set up it for the whole browser.

Advanced usage

The library ships with tools that hide all the communication logic but you can use the tools used internally to communicate directly with Chrome debug protocol.

Example:

Create a session and send a message to the target

Debugging

You can ease the debugging by setting a delay before each operation is made:

Browser (standalone)

Interacting with DOM

Find one element on a page by CSS selector:

Find all elements inside another element by CSS selector:

Find all elements on a page by XPath selector:

Wait for an element by CSS selector:

If a string is passed to Page::waitUntilContainsElement, an instance of CSSSelector is created for you by Page::waitForElement. To use other selectors, you can pass an instance of the required Selector.

Wait for element by XPath selector:

You can send out a text to an element or click on it:

You can upload file to file from the input:

You can get element text or attribute:

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for contribution details.

License

This project is licensed under the The MIT License (MIT).