Website screenshots

Question

Is there any way of taking a screenshot of a website in PHP, then saving it to a file?

Answer 1

There is a lot of options and they all have their pros and cons. Here is list of options ordered by implementation difficulty.

Option 1: Use an API (the easiest)

• ApiFlash (based on chrome)
• EvoPDF (has an option for html)
• Grabzit
• ...

Pros

• Execute Javascript
• Near perfect rendering
• Fast when caching options are correctly used
• Scale is handled by the APIs
• Precise timing, viewport, ...
• Most of the time they offer a free plan

Cons

• Not free if you plan to use them a lot

Option 2: Use one of the many available libraries

• dom-to-image
• wkhtmltoimage (included in the wkhtmltopdf tool)
• phpwkhtmltopdf
• ...

Pros

• Conversion is quite fast most of the time

Cons

• Bad rendering
• Does not execute javascript
• No support for recent web features (FlexBox, Advanced Selectors, Webfonts, Box Sizing, Media Queries, HTML5 tags...)
• Sometimes not so easy to install
• Complicated to scale

Option 3: Use PhantomJs and maybe a wrapper library

• PhantomJs
• php-phantomjs (php wrapper library for PhantomJs)
• ...

Pros

• Execute Javascript
• Quite fast

Cons

• Bad rendering
• PhantomJs has been deprecated and is not maintained anymore.
• No support for recent web features (FlexBox, Advanced Selectors, Webfonts, Box Sizing, Media Queries, HTML5 tags...)
• Complicated to scale
• Not so easy to make it work if there is images to be loaded ...

Option 4: Use Chrome Headless and maybe a wrapper library

• Chrome Headless
• chrome-devtools-protocol
• puphpeteer
• ...

Pros

• Execute Javascript
• Near perfect rendering

Cons

• Not so easy to have exactly the wanted result regarding:
  • page load timing
  • proxy integration
  • auto scrolling
  • ...
• Complicated to scale
• Quite slow and even slower if the html contains external links

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of ApiFlash. I did my best to provide an honest and useful answer.