Example abstraction over the php-webdriver package.
Prerequisites:
- a non-root user with sudo capabilities (see setup-new-sudo-user.sh)
- composer package manager (see install-composer.sh)
Clone the project and install the dependencies.
git clone https://github.com/efcor/chromedriver-php-example.git
cd chromedriver-php-example
composer install
Download chromedriver binary from
https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads. As of this writing, the
download comes as a zip containing just the binary file, so you need to unzip it. Name it chromedriver and place it in
the bin directory (of the project directory, not the /bin directory of your system).
If you are on MacOS, you must run the a command from the project directory, in order to prevent MacOS from disallowing the program to run:
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine bin/chromedriver
Simply run the scrape.php script to see a demo.
php scrape.php
It should take less than 10 seconds for the script to run (longer if on a low-resource system). Then, check the
screenshots directory to confirm the script worked. You should see a few screenshots of websites.
Use the code in scrape.php as a starting point for your own needs! Open Browser.php to view all the available methods.
You must have a non-root user with sudo capabilities. See the "Installation" section above for a link to instructions.
Update apt and your installed packages.
sudo apt update
# if you are on a brand new vm, go ahead and update all the software
sudo apt -y upgrade
Install some prerequisite libraries for Chrome, and unzip (for composer later)
sudo apt install -y libxss1 libappindicator1 libindicator7 unzip
# if your php version doesn't have curl and zip extensions,
# install those (replace "8.0" with your version)
sudo apt install -y php8.0-curl php8.0-zip
Download and install Chrome
wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome*.deb
There will be an error here. Run this to fix it
sudo apt install -y -f
At this point, follow the instructions under the "Installation" section above.
You will probably need to kill chrome after the script finishes to prevent running out of memory:
pkill -9 chrome
Here is how to add swap to an Ubuntu 20.04 vm that has no swap:
sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
Verify the swap area has been enabled
sudo swapon -s
Output:
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/swapfile file 2097148 44088 -1
Add the following line to the /etc/fstab file to make the swap file permanent.
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
To click on coordinates in the browser window without involving any elements:
(new WebDriverActions($browser->getWindow()))->moveByOffset(563, 407)->perform();
(new WebDriverActions($browser->getWindow()))->click()->perform();