In this new tutorial on the NetTuts.com site Andrew Perkins shares a way that you can use Symfony2's own Crawler to do some simple functional testing.

Testing your web applications is one of the best things you can do to ensure its health, safety, and security, both for the app and your app's visitors. Symfony 2 offers a complete integration testing suite that you can use to make sure your applications run just as you expect. Today we'll look at how we can use Symfony 2 and PHPUnit, the testing framework that it employs, to write basic functional tests using the Crawler.

He starts off by helping you get a Symfony2 instance installed, the Standard edition, and grabbing the latest PHPUnit phar file from the project's site. He then gets into the actual development of the Crawler bundle, using the command line Symfony tool to do some of the automatic code generation for you. They show how to execute the PHPUnit tests and make the first controller/action/routes for the sample pages to test. He then makes the first test file, extending the "WebTestCase" class from the Symfony2 components. He makes a simple client, executes the request and shows how to test various parts of the response (including an example of mimicking the clicking of a link).

Several sites have areas that have content protected behind a login making them difficult to pull into a script. Juozas Kaziukenas has created an option to help you past this hurdle - a PHP class (that uses cURL) that can POST the login data to the script and pull back the session ID.

But how you are going to do all this work with cookies and session id? Luckily, PHP has cURL extension which simplifies connecting to remote addresses, using cookies, staying in one session, POSTing data, etc. It’s really powerful library, which basically allows you to use all HTTP headers functionality. For secure pages crawling, I’ve created very simple Secure_Crawler class.

The class uses the built-in cURL functionality to send the POST information (in this case the username and password, but it can be easily changed for whatever the form requires) and provides a get() method to use for fetching other pages once you're connected.