PHP Web Scraping Tutorial

This repository contains working examples from the PHP Web Scraping Tutorial.

Installation

composer install

Examples

1. Basic cURL Example

Simple example using PHP's native cURL library:

php examples/01-basic-curl.php

2. cURL with Headers

Adding browser-like headers to avoid detection:

php examples/02-curl-with-headers.php

3. Synchronous Requests with Guzzle

Using Guzzle for cleaner HTTP requests:

php examples/03-synchronous-guzzle.php

4. Asynchronous Requests

Fast concurrent requests using Guzzle promises:

php examples/04-async-guzzle.php

5. HTML Parsing with DomCrawler

Extracting data using XPath and CSS selectors:

php examples/05-html-parsing.php

6. Complete Hacker News Scraper

Full production-ready scraper with error handling:

php examples/06-complete-scraper.php

7. ScrapingForge Integration

Using ScrapingForge API to bypass anti-bot protection:

# Set your API key first
export SCRAPINGFORGE_API_KEY="your_api_key_here"
php examples/07-scrapingforge.php

Requirements

• PHP 7.4 or higher
• Composer

Best Practices

1. Respect robots.txt - Always check the website's robots.txt file
2. Rate limiting - Add delays between requests
3. Error handling - Use try-catch blocks
4. User-Agent rotation - Rotate user agents to appear natural

Learn More

Read the full tutorial at scrapingforge.com/blog/web-scraping-with-php

License

MIT