Can Symfony Panther be used for both GET and POST requests?

Symfony Panther is a library that provides a browser testing and web scraping tool for PHP, which leverages the WebDriver protocol. It is primarily used for end-to-end (E2E) testing of web applications and for crawling AJAX-heavy websites. Panther operates by controlling real browsers, such as Google Chrome or Firefox, through the WebDriver protocol.

While Panther is not specifically designed as a traditional HTTP client to perform GET and POST requests in the same way that tools like Guzzle or Symfony HttpClient are, it can simulate these actions as part of its web browsing capabilities.

For a GET request, simply navigating to a URL with Panther effectively performs a GET request:

use Symfony\Component\Panther\PantherTestCase;

class MyPantherTest extends PantherTestCase
{
    public function testGetRequest()
    {
        // This will launch the browser and perform a GET request
        $client = static::createPantherClient();
        $crawler = $client->request('GET', 'https://example.com');

        // Do something with the crawler, like checking the response content
        $this->assertStringContainsString('Example Domain', $crawler->filter('h1')->text());
    }
}

For a POST request, you can simulate the submission of a form, which is equivalent to making a POST request:

public function testPostRequest()
{
    $client = static::createPantherClient();
    $crawler = $client->request('GET', 'https://example.com/form');

    // Find the form to submit
    $form = $crawler->selectButton('Submit')->form();

    // Set form field values
    $form['field_name'] = 'value';
    // ...

    // Submit the form, which will perform a POST request
    $crawler = $client->submit($form);

    // Do something with the crawler after the POST request
}

In this example, Panther retrieves a page that contains a form, fills out the form fields, and then submits it, which results in a POST request being sent to the form's action URL. This is how you simulate a POST request with Panther.

It's important to note that while you can use Symfony Panther to perform actions similar to GET and POST requests, it is an abstraction layer above the actual HTTP protocol, and it is not designed for REST API testing or similar use cases. If you need to work with HTTP requests and responses directly, you might want to consider using Symfony's HttpClient component or other dedicated HTTP clients.