Web Scraping With PHP

Install the modern stack with Composer: composer require guzzlehttp/guzzle symfony/dom-crawler symfony/css-selector. The CssSelector component lets DomCrawler accept CSS selectors (not just XPath).

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use GuzzleHttp\Client;
use Symfony\Component\DomCrawler\Crawler;

$client = new Client(['headers' => ['User-Agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0']]);
$html = $client->get('https://books.toscrape.com/')->getBody()->getContents();

$crawler = new Crawler($html);
$crawler->filter('article.product_pod')->each(function (Crawler $node) {
    $title = $node->filter('h3 a')->attr('title');
    $price = $node->filter('.price_color')->text();
    echo "$title | $price\n";
});

filter() takes a CSS selector and returns a new Crawler; each() iterates matches; text() reads text and attr() reads an attribute. For XPath instead of CSS, use filterXPath('//...').

Many older tutorials still teach Goutte. It is now deprecated and archived — its code was merged into Symfony. The direct replacement is Symfony\Component\BrowserKit\HttpBrowser, which adds clicking links and submitting forms on top of DomCrawler. Install with composer require symfony/browser-kit symfony/http-client:

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use Symfony\Component\BrowserKit\HttpBrowser;
use Symfony\Component\HttpClient\HttpClient;

$browser = new HttpBrowser(HttpClient::create());
$crawler = $browser->request('GET', 'https://books.toscrape.com/');

while (true) {
    $crawler->filter('article.product_pod h3 a')->each(function ($node) {
        echo $node->attr('title') . "\n";
    });

    $next = $crawler->filter('li.next a');
    if ($next->count() === 0) break;
    $crawler = $browser->click($next->link());   // follow pagination
}

This gives you the same convenience Goutte offered — a browsing session that follows links and submits forms — using maintained Symfony components.

Guzzle and DomCrawler do not run JavaScript. For client-side-rendered pages, Symfony Panther drives a real Chrome/Firefox browser and shares the DomCrawler API you already know. Install: composer require symfony/panther.

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use Symfony\Component\Panther\Client;

$client = Client::createChromeClient();
$client->request('GET', 'https://quotes.toscrape.com/js/');
$client->waitFor('.quote');   // wait for JS to render

$crawler = $client->getCrawler();
$crawler->filter('.quote')->each(function ($node) {
    $text = $node->filter('.text')->text();
    $author = $node->filter('.author')->text();
    echo "$author: $text\n";
});

$client->quit();

Panther uses the same selectors as DomCrawler, so moving from static to dynamic scraping is mostly swapping the client. php-webdriver is the lower-level alternative if you need direct Selenium control.

The canonical 2026 stack is Guzzle + Symfony DomCrawler, with HttpBrowser for sessions and Panther for JavaScript.

The PHP code is straightforward; anti-bot defenses are the real obstacle. Guzzle's TLS fingerprint and headers flag it as non-browser to Cloudflare, DataDome, and Akamai, and headless Panther is detectable too. DomCrawler cannot extract data from a challenge page.

Solving this means residential proxies, a real browser fingerprint, and CAPTCHA handling. A scraping API does it server-side — your PHP code posts the URL with Guzzle and parses the returned HTML with DomCrawler: