Use Laravel Dusk, browser automation and PHP to programmatically surf the web

Laravel Dusk is a powerful browser automation tool for Laravel. With Dusk you can programmatically test your own applications or visit any website on the internet using a real Chrome browser. Using Dusk you can automate repetitive tasks, scrape information from other sites or test to make sure your app always works in the browser. In this tutorial we’ll go through how to create a job, login to a mythical website and click around.

Create a new Laravel app:

$ laravel new dusk-scraper
$ composer require --dev laravel/dusk
$ php artisan dusk:install
Dusk scaffolding installed successfully.

In the tests/DuskTestCase.php file that Laravel generated you will have a call to startChromeDriver in the prepare function (below). The prepare function gets called before the Dusk test is executed. It’s an abstract class so probably not a good place for us to put our code. We can make a new fresh dusk test case that extends the DuskTestCase with an Artisan command:

$ php artisan dusk:make ScrapeTheWebTest

This file (ScrapeTheWeb.php) will appear in tests/Browser directory. You can run the test with another Artisan command:

$ php artisan dusk