How to generate screenshot of a website from a URL?

Question

I am developing a website using Spring MVC. I have a form where I ask user for his website's URL. I need to show him the screenshot of the website after he enters its URL.

Should I generate the image at the backend or the frontend?

I do need to show the image to the user on his dashboard. I can't decide if I should generate it each time or store it at the backend. Storing at the backend will be better for performance whereas generating it everytime will show the current screenshot to the user.

What good would it be doing it on the backend? (unless you need to store the image for later) — OneCricketeer, Nov 30 '15 at 08:11
Alternative dupe: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1504034/take-a-screenshot-of-a-web-page-in-java — Cerbrus, Nov 30 '15 at 08:13
@cricket_007 I do need to show the image to the user on his dashboard. I can't decide if I should generate it each time or store it at the backend. — Vineet, Nov 30 '15 at 08:14

Carlos Mayo · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-30T08:13:37.280

Take a look to PhantomJS. You can generate png screenshot throught command line.

Here's a script for PhantomJS which take two input arguments (url and output file):

var page = require('webpage').create();
var args = require('system').args;

var web_url = args[1];
var file_name = args[2];

page.viewportSize = { width: 1200, height: 1602 };
page.clipRect = {top:0, left: 0, width: 1200, height: 1602 };

page.open(web_url, 'GET', function () {

page.evaluate(function() {
    document.body.bgColor = 'white';
});
var ret = page.render(file_name);

var exitcode = 0;
if(ret) exitcode = 1;

phantom.exit(exitcode);
});

And then you can call to PhantomJS like this:

phantomjs scriptfile.js http://www.myweb.com outputfile.png

How to generate screenshot of a website from a URL?

1 Answers1