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

Answer 1

I use the http://webthumb.bluga.net service for thumbnail generation. Robust, powerful, easy to use, and very reasonable rates. I have a high traffic production website using this service and it works very well. Given the difficulty of creating a robust web screenshot service, it's nice to have someone else do the hard work.

Answer 2

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 3

You actually need to have the server launch the web browser in question and take a screenshot of the application with the appropriate libraries. Apache will not render the page for you so you have to have software that will.

Answer 4

Yes, that is what is needed. I do this in asp.net, and I actually create a WebBrowser object that is avaialable in the .Net framework class libraries to generate the screenshot.

Answer 5

virtual framebuffer X server

I would rather recommend XVFB (virtual framebuffer X server) is the best solution for taking screenshots of a headless server. Virtual framebuffer X server xvfb provides an X server that can run on machines with no display hardware and no physical input devices. I am using that on my server for testing URLs and taking its screenshot. We are using Ubuntu & XVFB + FIREFOX. It is working fine. Modify according to your needs.Take a look on these articles. It might be use full for you.

http://www.semicomplete.com/blog/geekery/xvfb-firefox.html

http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/g/xvfb.htm

http://www.xfree86.org/4.0.1/Xvfb.1.html

Answer 6

PhantomJS is a headless (commandline) WebKit-based browser which can be easily scripted to save a screenshot of webpage.