chrome

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 7.4-8.5 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:

$ composer require 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":

use HeadlessChromium\BrowserFactory;

// replace default 'chrome' with 'chromium-browser'
$browserFactory = new BrowserFactory('chromium-browser');

Debugging

The following example disables headless mode to ease debugging

use HeadlessChromium\BrowserFactory;

$browserFactory = new BrowserFactory();

$browser = $browserFactory->createBrowser([
    'headless' => false, // disable headless mode
]);

Other debug options:

[
    'connectionDelay' => 0.8,            // add 0.8 second of delay between each instruction sent to Chrome,
    'debugLogger'     => 'php://stdout', // will enable verbose mode
]

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.

use HeadlessChromium\BrowserFactory;

$browserFactory = new BrowserFactory();
$browser = $browserFactory->createBrowser([
    'windowSize'   => [1920, 1000],
    'enableImages' => false,
]);

// this browser will be created without any options
$browser2 = $browserFactory->createBrowser();

Options set using the setOptions and addOptions methods will persist.

$browserFactory->setOptions([
    'windowSize' => [1920, 1000],
]);

// both browser will have the same 'windowSize' option
$browser1 = $browserFactory->createBrowser();
$browser2 = $browserFactory->createBrowser();

$browserFactory->addOptions(['enableImages' => false]);

// this browser will have both the 'windowSize' and 'enableImages' options
$browser3 = $browserFactory->createBrowser();

$browserFactory->addOptions(['enableImages' => true]);

// this browser will have the previous 'windowSize', but 'enableImages' will be true
$browser4 = $browserFactory->createBrowser();

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)

$page = $browser->createPage();

Get opened pages (tabs)

$pages = $browser->getPages();

Close the browser

$browser->close();

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

$browser->setPagePreScript('// Simulate navigator permissions;
const originalQuery = window.navigator.permissions.query;
window.navigator.permissions.query = (parameters) => (
    parameters.name === 'notifications' ?
        Promise.resolve({ state: Notification.permission }) :
        originalQuery(parameters)
);');

Page API

Navigate to an URL

// navigate
$navigation = $page->navigate('http://example.com');

// wait for the page to be loaded
$navigation->waitForNavigation();

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:

use HeadlessChromium\Page;

// wait 10secs for the event "DOMContentLoaded" to be triggered
$navigation->waitForNavigation(Page::DOM_CONTENT_LOADED, 10000);

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:

use HeadlessChromium\Exception\OperationTimedOut;
use HeadlessChromium\Exception\NavigationExpired;

try {
    $navigation->waitForNavigation()
} catch (OperationTimedOut $e) {
    // too long to load
} catch (NavigationExpired $e) {
    // An other page was loaded
}

The navigation accepts the options strict, referrer, referrerPolicy and transitionType:

// navigate with a custom referrer
$navigation = $page->navigate('http://example.com', ['referrer' => 'https://google.com/']);

Evaluate script on the page

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

// navigate
$navigation = $page->navigate('http://example.com');

// wait for the page to be loaded
$navigation->waitForNavigation();

// evaluate script in the browser
$evaluation = $page->evaluate('document.documentElement.innerHTML');

// wait for the value to return and get it
$value = $evaluation->getReturnValue();

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().

Call a function

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

$evaluation = $page->callFunction(
    "function(a, b) {\n    window.foo = a + b;\n}",
    [1, 2]
);

$value = $evaluation->getReturnValue();

Add a script tag

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

$page->addScriptTag([
    'content' => file_get_contents('path/to/jquery.js')
])->waitForResponse();

$page->evaluate('$(".my.element").html()');

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

$page->addScriptTag([
    'url' => 'https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.3.1.min.js'
])->waitForResponse();

$page->evaluate('$(".my.element").html()');

Set the page HTML

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

// Basic
$page->setHtml('<p>text</p>');

// Specific timeout & event
$page->setHtml('<p>text</p>', 10000, Page::NETWORK_IDLE);

When a page's HTML is updated, we'll wait for the page to unload. You can specify how l