I know there is not a direct way to take a screen shot of a web page with PHP. What would be the most straightforward way to accomplish this? Are there any command line tools that could do this that I might be able to execute from a PHP script (I'm thinking something that would run in a 'NIX OS (OS X and/or Linux in particular)?
Edit: Or maybe some sort of web service I could access via SOAP or REST or ...
Edit #2: I found a related question discussing the CLI option, but I'd still be open to other methods if anyone knows of anything.
See webkit2png for an OSX commandline program that does this.
The page also mentions Linux alternatives.
[edit]: wkhtml2image is the newest kid in town, and it works better then anything else i've ever used.
[edit2]: As of 2014, PhantomJS seems to be the way to go, as it has the newest webkit version of the alternatives I know about.
[edit3]: In 2019, Puppeteer is the way to go. Official headless chrome, always up to date.
You can use the GD functions imagegrabscreen() or imagegrabwindow() to take a screenshot, but they're only available on Windows at the moment.
http://www.thumbshots.org/
html2ps does a decent job for relatively simple pages, and it requires very little in terms of external binaries, meaning it's very easy to install/use. If you control the pages you'll be capturing, then you can ensure that they'll render appropriately in html2ps. If you're hoping to capture arbitrary URLs, however, I'm not sure that the PHP port of HTML2PS is up to the task. It's also not the fastest thing in the world (expect render times in the seconds for complex pages), but that doesn't really matter for some applications.
Not sure if this would be enough for you, because it has some added stuff there, but would be worth giving it a try: http://www.snap.com
It's possible to get a base64 encoded image of a site by using the Google pagespeed api.
You can specify desktop or mobile views, but you are limited to an image of a certain size.
Related
Alright all,
Been doing a bit of research and want to know if anyone else has tried this... and what approach would you take.
I'm planning on doing a website which will display a screenshot of a website (maybe based on the url in someones email address).
There's going to be alot of people getting this so, pre-production of the screenshots isn't a solution.
Soooooo... does anyone know of any solutions:
Thumbnail service that builds on demand (no queuing)?
HTML5/Canvas script that will let me do this. I've found one but it won't run cross site.
Any other solution?
It'll be built in PHP.
Thanks
PVS.
This site http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/ is the best you will get right now with regard to a client side script. It uses the calculated properties of elements to render a page, and I must say it looks good!
Update:
A demo here: http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/tests/templates/projection/index.html . Click to toggle the 'real' view with the rendered image.
I've played about with wkhtmltoimage before, it was pretty good for what I was using it for, but does require you to install onto your server
For taking screenshots of websites (one of the features) i built a service ontop of the awesome PhantomJS which is an excellent headless browser which uses the webkit engine (same that safari uses). Although it's headless, it still has deps in QT and a virtual framebuffer (xvfb). Hope this helps: http://www.phantomjs.org/
You can use html2canvas. More information here.
There exists numerous solutions on generating a thumbnail or an image preview of a webpage. Some of these solutions are webs-based like websnapshots, windows libraries such as PHP's imagegrabscreen (only works on windows), and KDE's wkhtml. Many more do exist.
However, I'm looking for a GUI-less solution. Something I can create an API around and link it to php or python.
I'm comfortable with python, php, C, and shell. This is a personal project, so I'm not interested in commercial applications as I'm aware of their existence.
Any ideas?
You can run a web browser or web control within Xvfb, and use something like import to capture it.
I'll never get back the time I wasted on wkhtml and Xvfb, along with the joy of embedding a monolithic binary from google onto my system. You can save yourself a lot of time and headache by abandoning wkhtml2whatever completely and installing phantom.js. Once I did that, I had five lines of shell code and beautiful images in no time.
I had a single problem - using ww instead of www in a url caused the process to fail without meaningful error messages. Eventually I saw the dns lookup problem, and my faith was restored.
But seriously, every other avenue of thumbnailing seemed to be out of date and/or buggy.
phantom.js = it changed my life.
I've decided to code some applications in PHP that are supposed to run offline in the user's machine. However, I can't seem to find an user-friendly install wizard to create a local server in where the script will run. Any ideas?
PS: Here's an example of what I want: http://www.nolapro.com
You could go to the old school route and try using PHP-GTK.
Text Tutorial here: http://www.kksou.com/php-gtk2/References/Compiling-standalone-PHP-GTK2-applications-on-windows-using-PriadoBlender.php
or you could go the route that I believe has much more promise: Adobe AIR + PHP
It has the added bonus of running on any platform!
Video tutorials here: http://www.vtc.com/products/Adobe-AIR-PHP-Development-Tutorials.htm
There's also a new player in the game, Appcelerator. It lets you write your code in whatever language you want (PHP, Ruby, Python, etc) and compile it for the platform of choice (iPhone, Android, Windows, OSX). Parts of it are still beta, but it looks unbelievably slick & cool, and there are lots of tutorial videos. http://www.appcelerator.com
I hate to advocate this, because it just feels so wrong. You would probably be better off using a language inteded for use for stand-alone applications, if you're going to be doing this often or in a production setting.
With that said, a colleague of mine used to use the Bambalam PHP to EXE Compiler for this. He actually had a profitable product built around it.
Bambalam will generate an EXE that doesn't rely on any external DLLs, based on your PHP code.
http://www.bambalam.se/bamcompile/
If you have a webapp written, you maybe want to deploy on client, a possible way is use wapache, which is a standalone apache bundled with your application, and an integrated (IE) browser control inside.
http://wapache.sourceforge.net/
A new feature of PHP 5.4 & 6 can help you, the builtin web-server.
http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.webserver.php
With this feature you can host locally your php app without external webserver, and access on localhost.
If you really talking about a client application you are really wrong to do this.
If you want to wrap a server + browser to deploy your web based application so it runs local you might check out three options:
1) Deploy a simple webkit browser (you can get a QT Webkit Browser in 30 lines of code) and an apache server that is installed somewhere standalone (not via the apache control script as this uses port 80 and i probably conflicts with another installed webserver.
2) Look at the Firefox PRISMA solution. I have read about this only in a news article but it wrapps the firefox around one single start URL. You have to deploy a webserver in the same way as
3) Try to wrap it as a HTA application. Search the corresponding info on MSDN.
I would prefer (1) as you can add special application interacting code as needed.
I've been taken onboard to work on a PHP-based web application. One part of the application generates thumbnail images for MS Office documents on demand, and it uses MS Office + the VeryPDF docprint utility to do this. Because of this one requirement, the system is running on Windows Server 2003 + IIS.
I would prefer to have the system running on a Linux server, rather than MS, as I have far more experience in administering Linux systems than Windows and we have no other in-house technical staff.
Does anyone know a way to handle the document conversion using native Linux software? I would love something PHP native, but am willing to look outside that if necessary.
I have never done anything like this, so I'm just throwing an idea off the top of my head.
Have you thought about utilizing Open Office's capabilities to create thumbnail images? I know OO saves thumbnail images within a created document, so all you need to do is extract the image to display it. (This is demonstrated on the Ubuntu forums.) You could always do something sort of "hackish" where you use run a file through OpenOffice and extract the image to display a small thumbnail.
Again, I have no idea how well this will work, but it may be worth a shot.
To anyone else who comes across this, I have ended up going with the newer version of jodconverter. The sample code includes a basic web page that can be POSTed to using something like Pear's HTTP_Request2. A sample class (by yours truly) which uses this is mentioned in the comments in jodconverter's group on google code.
I need to create Snapshots / Thumbshots / Site preview a-site.com.
There are some site as thumbshot.org that meets with I need. But I do not want to use an external service, not to depend on others for my project (What would happen if they close the site?)
For this reason, I am looking for some project to let me do this.
Any idea?
On windows you can use GD's imagegrabwindow() function.
Edit: The help page actually shows you how to grab a screenshot from IE.
There isn't anything in the PHP library to do this - you're looking at setting up an external application (with a queue) to take images, although you can of course use PHP to add items to the queue.
There are a couple of Windows functions in GD that takes screen shots of the computer (webserver - not the client) so perhaps you could write a script in PHP to do this.
Edit: Was thinking of these: imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow. I'm not sure they will do what you want however (even in full screen mode Firefox has ablue bar at the top of the screen - not sure about other browsers). However, Pierre has something on these functions if you're interested.
I'd suggest writing an application in another language (I assume .NET has something) to do this for you.
Edit: This page tells you how to do it in C#
There's not much PHP would do for you in this situation. You'd need a complete (X)HTML rendering engine with CSS-support, possibly also with JavaScript support.
That, or use some kind of kinky script that would launch a real browser, and take a screenshot out of that. Either way, PHP is probably not the right tool for the operational part.
There's a Firefox extension that converts the webpage you're viewing to an image:
http://www.screengrab.org/
http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146
If you're willing to get creative, it might be possible to access this problematically.
Thanks to all.
I found a pseudo-solution, (using dcom + imagegrabscreen + wamp).
I need to resize the final.png with gd, because the png is equal to resolution of client (in my home, is a picture of 1650*1280).
Whe I end this, I will post a .zip file to dowload
Thanks again
(But if anyone have a better idea, I am happy to see that)
PS: Sorry for my english