Generating Website screenshots on CentOS using PHP

Question

Are there any free utilities that can be used to take screenshots of webpages and websites on centos and that can be run through php.

Thanks

score 7 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

7

There are various commandline utilities available. Most start one of the browser engines in headless X11 and take a screenshot then. A particular common one is khtml2png which can be used from php like this (not sure if there is a precompiled version for CentOS):

exec("khtml2png --width 800 --height 600 http://google.com/ img.png");

A few more are listed here: Command line program to create website screenshots (on Linux)

edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

Community

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answered Mar 28 '11 at 23:15

mario

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I am unable to run this command through php. It has to be run through terminal. I want to automate the thumbnail creation through PHP. exec is enabled on the php, but it is just this particular command. I have a dedicated server so I can install applications, so you can suggest those to me. But the application should be able to ran through PHP. – Vish Mar 29 '11 at 16:38
Do you get a specific error message? (Use `2>/dev/stdout` to capture it). If you cannot start this command from exec(), then the other options (firefox & capturing X11 root window) won't work much better. -- The other commonly recommended alternative would be `wkhtml2pdf` http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/ (which then however requires a second step to transform it into a PNG image again..) – mario Mar 29 '11 at 16:50
if you dont mind could you please give me steps for installing wkhtml2pdf and its php counterpart. thanks...:) – Vish Mar 29 '11 at 16:52
Just tried it out. It was extremely simple. I took this download http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/downloads/detail?name=wkhtmltoimage-0.10.0_rc2-static-amd64.tar.bz2 and extracted it. It's a singe executable, little fuss. Then just invoke it with `exec("./wkhtmltoimage-amd64 http://google.com/ google.png");` and it should generate a PNG. (This is a special version which generates images instead of PDF screenshots. Cool.) – mario Mar 29 '11 at 16:57

PiZzL3 · Answer 2 · 2011-03-28T23:13:14.387

I don't think that's possible because PHP doesn't render websites like a browser does.

EDIT: However, you could save each page's raw unrendered HTML using a PHP cURL script.

eg:

$websites[] = 'http://google.com'; 
$websites[] = 'http://stackoverflow.com';
$websites[] = 'http://msn.com'; 
$websites[] = 'http://microsoft.com';

foreach ($websites as $site)
{
    $curl = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $site);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    $data = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close($curl);

    if(!empty($data)) 
    {
        savePageToFile($data); //placeholder, not real function
    }
}

While this info is accurate, it doesn't have much to do with taking a screen shot of a rendered web page. — Klinky, Mar 28 '11 at 23:57

Generating Website screenshots on CentOS using PHP

2 Answers2