Server Generated web screenshots?

Question

One problem I've been toying with off and on is a service that requires my server to produce a screenshot of a webpage at a given url. The problem is that I don't have any idea how I would accomplish this. I mostly use a LAMP software stack, so answers that were given with that in mind would be the most helpful. Again the basic requirements are: Given a url, the server needs to produce an image file of the rendered web page at that url. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You might also want to take a look at webkit, it's known for being easier to embed (used by Adobe for AIR, by Google for Chrome, by Apple for the iPhone...) then other rendering engines. This might take a little more work to setup, but it would be a lot more stable than some hack that launched a webbrowser and took a screenshot.

Answer 2

IF your server is a Mac, then I recommend webkit2png, which is a short python program that leverages WebKit's Objective-C API to render an URL. Personally, I use it in combination with WWW::Mechanize to walk my development site and make screenshots of every page -- useful for testing functionality, showing clients and keeping screenshots up-to-date. The resulting screenshot is perfect, but sometimes very tall for long, scrolling pages.

IF your server has a non-bare-bones Linux distro with KDE installed, then you might try khtml2png. I have not tried that myself, but saw it mentioned on the webkit2png page.