myerscode/beacon

A fluent PHP wrapper for web page content retrieval, screenshots, PDFs, Lighthouse audits, and concurrent site crawling using Chrome.

dev-main 2026-03-31 18:55 UTC

Requires

• php: ^8.5
• dbrekelmans/bdi: ^1.4
• symfony/panther: ^2.4

Requires (Dev)

• laravel/pint: ^1.29
• phpstan/phpstan: ^2.0
• phpunit/phpunit: ^13.0

MIT

• myerscode
• Fred Myerscough

• browser
• pdf
• seo
• webdriver
• spider
• crawler
• chrome
• scraping
• screenshot
• Panther
• lighthouse
• web-scraping

README

Beacon

A fluent PHP wrapper around Symfony Panther for web page content retrieval and site analysis. Renders JavaScript-heavy pages (SPAs, React, Vue, etc.) and provides an easy API for source code, screenshots, PDFs, meta tags, link extraction, Lighthouse audits, and concurrent site crawling.

Requirements

• PHP 8.5+
• Chrome/Chromium browser installed
• Node.js 16+ and Lighthouse CLI (only required for Lighthouse features)

Installation

composer require myerscode/beacon

ChromeDriver is installed automatically via dbrekelmans/bdi on composer install.

Quick Start

// Get the fully rendered HTML of any page
$html = beacon()->visit('https://example.com')->source();

// Take a screenshot or save as PDF
beacon()->visit('https://example.com')->screenshot('/tmp/shot.png');
beacon()->visit('https://example.com')->pdf('/tmp/page.pdf');

// Page info
$title  = beacon()->visit('https://example.com')->title();
$status = beacon()->visit('https://example.com')->statusCode();
$links  = beacon()->visit('https://example.com')->links();
$meta   = beacon()->visit('https://example.com')->meta();

// Lighthouse audit
$scores = beacon()->visit('https://example.com')->lighthouse();

// Crawl the site for broken links
$results = beacon()->visit('https://example.com')->crawl();
$broken  = $results->broken();

Documentation

• Page — content, screenshots, PDF, links, meta, status code
• Lighthouse — category scores, individual audits, configuration, reports
• Crawler — concurrent spider crawl, broken link detection, retries, throttling
• Advanced Usage — browser configuration, dependency checking

License

MIT