facebook/php-webdriver is an awesome client for selenium and php.

You can use it to automate web tasks (as the OP wanted), or you can simply integrate php-webdriver to your testing framework. There are some project already providing this:

• Steward integrates php-webdriver directly to PHPUnit.
• Codeception testing framework provides BDD-layer on top of php-webdriver.
• You can also check out this blogpost + demo project, describing custom PHPUnit integration.

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Install Everything

1. Download and install facebook/php-webdriver. composer require facebook/webdriver

2. Download Selenium & Start it. java -jar selenium-server-standalone-#.jar

3. Download Quick Java and place it into your project directory.

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Usage

In this example, we use the extension quickjava to disable everything except javascript and cookies.

View more preference settings here:
https://github.com/ThatOneGuyDotNet/QuickJava/blob/master/defaults/preferences/defaults.js

View more example commands here:
https://github.com/facebook/php-webdriver/wiki/Example-command-reference

use Facebook\WebDriver\Firefox\FirefoxProfile;
use Facebook\WebDriver\Firefox\FirefoxDriver;
use Facebook\WebDriver\Remote\DesiredCapabilities;
use Facebook\WebDriver\Remote\RemoteWebDriver;

// Change this to the path of you xpi
$extensionPath = $this->container->getParameter('kernel.root_dir').'/../bin/selenium/quickjava-2.0.6-fx.xpi';

// Build our firefox profile
$profile = new FirefoxProfile();
$profile->addExtension($extensionPath);
$profile->setPreference('thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.curVersion', '2.0.6.1');
$profile->setPreference('thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.Images', 2);
$profile->setPreference('thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.AnimatedImage', 2);
$profile->setPreference('thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.CSS', 2);
//$profile->setPreference('thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.Cookies', 2);
$profile->setPreference('thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.Flash', 2);
$profile->setPreference('thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.Java', 2);
//$profile->setPreference('thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.JavaScript', 2);
$profile->setPreference("thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.Silverlight", 2);

// Create DC + Driver
$dc = DesiredCapabilities::firefox();
$dc->setCapability(FirefoxDriver::PROFILE, $profile);

$driver = RemoteWebDriver::create($host, $dc);
$driver->get('http://stackoverflow.com');

// Do stuff - https://github.com/facebook/php-webdriver/wiki/Example-command-reference
//$driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::id("element-id"));

// The HTML Source code
$html = $driver->getPageSource();

// Firefox should be open and you can see no images or css was loaded