Goutte, a simple PHP Web Scraper

Goutte is a screen scraping and web crawling library for PHP.

Goutte provides a nice API to crawl websites and extract data from the HTML/XML responses.

Requirements

Goutte depends on PHP 5.5+ and Guzzle 6+.

Tip

If you need support for PHP 5.4 or Guzzle 4-5, use Goutte 2.x (latest phar).

If you need support for PHP 5.3 or Guzzle 3, use Goutte 1.x (latest phar).

Installation

Add fabpot/goutte as a require dependency in your composer.json file:

composer require fabpot/goutte

Usage

Create a Goutte Client instance (which extends Symfony\Component\BrowserKit\Client):

use Goutte\Client;

$client = new Client();

Make requests with the request() method:

// Go to the symfony.com website
$crawler = $client->request('GET', 'https://www.symfony.com/blog/');

The method returns a Crawler object (Symfony\Component\DomCrawler\Crawler).

To use your own Guzzle settings, you may create and pass a new Guzzle 6 instance to Goutte. For example, to add a 60 second request timeout:

use Goutte\Client;
use GuzzleHttp\Client as GuzzleClient;

$goutteClient = new Client();
$guzzleClient = new GuzzleClient(array(
    'timeout' => 60,
));
$goutteClient->setClient($guzzleClient);

Click on links:

// Click on the "Security Advisories" link
$link = $crawler->selectLink('Security Advisories')->link();
$crawler = $client->click($link);

Extract data:

// Get the latest post in this category and display the titles
$crawler->filter('h2 > a')->each(function ($node) {
    print $node->text()."\n";
});

Submit forms:

$crawler = $client->request('GET', 'https://github.com/');
$crawler = $client->click($crawler->selectLink('Sign in')->link());
$form = $crawler->selectButton('Sign in')->form();
$crawler = $client->submit($form, array('login' => 'fabpot', 'password' => 'xxxxxx'));
$crawler->filter('.flash-error')->each(function ($node) {
    print $node->text()."\n";
});

More Information

Read the documentation of the BrowserKit and DomCrawler Symfony Components for more information about what you can do with Goutte.

Pronunciation

Goutte is pronounced goot i.e. it rhymes with boot and not out.

Technical Information

Goutte is a thin wrapper around the following fine PHP libraries:

• Symfony Components: BrowserKit, CssSelector and DomCrawler;
• Guzzle HTTP Component.

License

Goutte is licensed under the MIT license.