PlaywrightPHP

Headless launch

Launch headless Chromium with Playwright PHP, open a web page, and print its title. A runnable example to check your installation.

This example launches Chromium without showing a browser window, opens example.com, and prints the page title.

Use it as the smallest headless smoke check after installation.

Run it

bash
php content/examples/headless.php

Expected output:

text
Title: Example Domain

Headless mode is the default choice for CI because it does not require a visible desktop session.

What it demonstrates

  • headless => true runs the browser without a visible window.
  • newPage() opens a tab.
  • goto() navigates to a URL.
  • title() reads browser state back into PHP.

Go next

Source

headless.php
php
<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

/*
 * This file is part of the community-maintained Playwright PHP project.
 * It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.
 *
 * (c) 2025-Present - Playwright PHP - https://github.com/playwright-php
 *
 * For the full copyright and license information, please view the LICENSE
 * file that was distributed with this source code.
 */

require_once __DIR__.'/../../vendor/autoload.php';

use Playwright\Playwright;

$context = Playwright::chromium([
    'headless' => true,
]);
$page = $context->newPage();

$page->goto('https://example.com');
echo 'Title: '.$page->title().PHP_EOL;

$context->close();