uuf6429/mink-electron-driver

Mink Electron Driver

Mink Electron Driver

, _(*1)

Mink Electron Driver (replaces JsonWireProtocol and PhantomJS with Electron), _(*2)

Electron is between 2 to 3 times faster than PhantomJS (source)., _(*3)

Table Of Contents

• Mink Electron Driver
  • Table Of Contents
  • Features and Advantages
  • Requirements
  • Installation
  • How Does It Work?

Features and Advantages

• Fully-featured web browser
• Quite fast, compared to alternatives
• Built with modern components
• Well supported (Electron receives frequent updates)
• Easily understandable codebase (it's either PHP or JS)
• Well tested (in addition to Mink driver tests, there are others)

Requirements

There a few things which are not taken care of automatically depending on your system., _(*4)

• Basics
  • PHP (5.5+) and Composer
  • Node.js (4+) and npm
• Linux
  • If run headless (ie, without a desktop) you need to install xvfb
  • Some libraries are required, more details here
• Windows
  • Build Tools may be required. These can be installed with one npm command

Installation

First make sure that the requirements above are met., _(*5)

Next, simply install the driver in your Behat project via Composer:, _(*6)

composer require uuf6429/mink-electron-driver

How Does It Work?

       PHP + Mink Driver Interface                    Node.js + Electron API
 ________________  |  ______________________     _____________  |  _______________ 
|  Behat + Mink  |_v_|       Client         |___|    Server   |_V_|   Electron    |
| (Your Project) |---| (ElectronDriver.php) |---| (Server.js) |---| (Web Browser) |
'----------------'   '----------------------' ^ '-------------'   '---------------'
                                              |
                      DNode comm. over UDS (with inet sockets fallback)

Since one cannot easily control Node.js from PHP, a client-server approach was taken, with a fast and lightweight transport (unix domain sockets) protocol (dnode)., _(*7)

The driver on the PHP side simply tells the server what to do and it controls the Electron web browser., _(*8)

The main reason why a client-server approach was taken is that Mink is synchronous by design., _(*9)