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 are many open source projects that can generate screenshots. For example PhantomJS, webkit2png etc

The big problem with these projects is that they are based on older browser technology and have problems rendering many sites, especially sites that use webfonts, flexbox, svg and various other additions to the HTML5 and CSS spec over the last couple of months/years.

I've tried a few of the third party services, and most are based on PhantomJS, meaning they also produce poor quality screenshots. The best third party service for generating website screenshots is urlbox.io. It is a paid service, although there is a free 7-day trial to test it out without committing to any paid plan.

Here is a link to the documentation, and below are simple steps to get it working in PHP with composer.

// 1 . Get the urlbox/screenshots composer package (on command line):
composer require urlbox/screenshots

// 2. Set up the composer package with Urlbox API credentials:
$urlbox = UrlboxRenderer::fromCredentials('API_KEY', 'API_SECRET');

// 3. Set your options (all options such as full page/full height screenshots, retina resolution, viewport dimensions, thumbnail width etc can be set here. See the docs for more.)
$options['url'] = 'example.com';

// 4. Generate the Urlbox url
$urlboxUrl = $urlbox->generateUrl($options);
// $urlboxUrl is now 'https://api.urlbox.io/v1/API_KEY/TOKEN/png?url=example.com'

// 5. Now stick it in an img tag, when the image is loaded in browser, the API call to urlbox will be triggered and a nice PNG screenshot will be generated!

For e.g. here's a full height screenshot of this very page:

https://api.urlbox.io/v1/ca482d7e-9417-4569-90fe-80f7c5e1c781/8f1666d1f4195b1cb84ffa5f992ee18992a2b35e/png?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstackoverflow.com%2Fquestions%2F757675%2Fwebsite-screenshots-using-php%2F43652083%2343652083&full_page=true