John Davidson

Message:

I am using Symfony Panther for web scraping (not testing) in a PHP project that does not use Symfony. I installed via Composer. Each time I need to scrape a link submitted by a user, I start a new Chrome Browser.

$client = Symfony\Component\Panther\Client::createChromeClient('/usr/bin/chromedriver');

$client->request('GET', $url);

$crawler = $client->waitFor('body');

Starting a new Chrome browser for each submitted $url is slow and resource intensive, so I want to keep the Chrome Client running on port 9515 and then each user's $url request can connect to that one same instance. Based on some user comments on Github, it sounds like a reasonable method:

• Spin up a Chrome instance on the Linux server, running on port 9515


• Make each url request connect to that instance.

I placed the first line i.e. with createChromeClient in a php script for a CRON job, but it never starts up the chrome client, and I get no errors either. Any ideas how to achieve this?

---

My Answer:
>get('https://example.com');

This code snippet creates a new instance of ChromeDriver every time a link is scraped. To optimize performance and resources, you can set up one instance of ChromeDriver for Panther and reuse it for multiple requests. Here's how you can do it:

php
// Create a global variable to store the Panther client
global $client;

// Check if the Panther client has been initialized
if (!$client) {
// Initialize the Panther client with ChromeDriver
$client = Symfony\Component\Panther\Client::createChromeClient('/usr/bin/chromedriver');
}

// Use the existing Panther client for scraping
$client->get('https://example.com');


By using this approach, you only create one instance of ChromeDriver for Panther and reuse it for all scraping requests. This can help improve performance and reduce resource usage.