Symfony Panther VS Goutte

Use some library with WebDriver API (f.ex. Symfony Panther if you want to stick to PHP, or Playwright) to run tests against your WP backend

Personal experience: - don’t use Behat unless you really needed a “story telling”, it has a intermediate layer Gherkin that you’ll need to code. You can write “Given/When/Then” steps but you’ll also need to write “php code” that will interpret this step. - using real browser be prepared for instability - any interaction with JavaScript can broken/delay execution - be prepared that this tests are call functional they are the most expensive test, so start small unit then integration and only then functional. - use https://github.com/symfony/panther or https://codeception.com/ you’ll have phpunit alike interface to run them. - you’ll need to reset state of your database each time to provide “isolation” and stability

For headless browser testing with symfony there is symfony panther (https://github.com/symfony/panther)

I did something similar with Symfony Panther combined with ChromeDriver.

For tools, I use PHPUnit, Symfony's PHPUnit helper classes, and Panther (for frontend/headless-browser testing, mostly JS behavior)

If you are comfortable with using composer and third party libraries I would suggest checking out https://github.com/symfony/panther

I like this one recently https://github.com/symfony/panther

Panther

What you're looking for is a package to control a "headless browser". The best one IMO is symfony/panther: https://github.com/symfony/panther

Look into Goutte (https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/Goutte). It has a simple API and you can extract text/links with ease by targeting CSS selectors. I have used it for a similar task before, you should be done within a day, max 2.

But this process will fail if the source site changes. Its better to look at parsing HTML code instead if using sub-strings. There are some nice libraries like Goutte that can help you with scraping a site.

Without discussing if it’s right or wrong to keep a version of third party code that could break everthing (take a look at this PR), we were suddenly at a crossroads: drop the deps=low and give up on this kind of tests or dig in the Composer manual and look for something that could possibly help us: you guessed right, conflict is what we needed (thanks to jakzal!).

I recommend looking into something more modern like Goutte. The GitHub page has some documentation.