Earlier this month, the Symfony blog made an announcement about a new browser testing and web scraping tool that's been released under the Symfony umbrella: Panther.

Since the very first version of Symfony 2, the framework provides a suite of convenient tools to create functional tests. They use the BrowserKit and DomCrawler components to simulate a web browser with a developer-friendly API.

The post starts with a "refresh" of the current WebTestCase helper functionality to create these functional tests. They also include an example of a repository class that stores/retrieves the news and a matching controller to handle the requests (and Twig templates for output). They then create a test using the WebTestCase functionality to get the index and ensure that some of the content is correct.

The tutorial then takes this same scenario and applies tests using the new Panther functionality. Where the WebTestCase uses a simulated browser internal to the framework, Panther uses an actual browser to run is tests using the Facebook PHP WebDriver library. They show the slight updates that would need to be made to the current test and the resulting output.

The tutorial goes on to provide other examples of tests for API requests and Javascript functionality for a Vue.js frontend. It wraps up mentioning some of the additional functionality Panther includes such as the ability to take screenshots and injecting Javascript into the pre-rendered page.