Tag / Selenium

by Kévin Dunglas

Panther: test your Symfony apps with real web browsers

From a few lines of jQuery to modern React/Vue… PWA, Symfony apps always contain JavaScript code. Unfortunately, the SF functional test helper and the Goutte web scrapping lib aren’t able to execute JS code. It means that they cannot assert on client-side generated HTML, test if an element is visible or not, deal with alert boxes or detect if a bug occurs only with a specific browser.

Panther is a brand new e2e testing and web scrapping library written in PHP that drives real browsers thanks to the WebDriver protocol from the W3C. It implements the exact same API than the BrowserKit component. It means than existing SF tests and Goutte scripts work without modification… but this time JS will be executed! The tool also brings new capabilities including taking screenshots, or executing custom JS in the execution context of the web page. To install Panther you only have one command to run, and it doesn’t need any dependency to install Panther. Let’s meet the feline!

During the first presentation of this talk, Panther reached 1,000 stars on GitHub!
To celebrate, I unveiled a set of new features including some brand new database testing helpers inspired from Laravel.

by Kévin Dunglas

Introducing Symfony Panther: a Browser Testing and Web Scraping Library for PHP

Today, an introduction blog post to Panther was published on the Symfony blog! Panther is a new browser testing and web scraping library I contributed to the Symfony project,
In the blog post, I showcase how to use Symfony, API Platform and VueJS together to create a small but modern app, and how to test it on Panther: