Capture website API

Capture screenshots of websites as a (host it yourself) API. This project is a wrapper around this library: https://github.com/sindresorhus/capture-website

Try it yourself (but beware that your screenshot is visible on a public website and the request may fail due to high traffic. Read further how prevent this):

curl 'https://capture-website-api.herokuapp.com/capture?url=https://twitter.com' -o screenshot.png

Installation

Docker

Run pre-built container from Docker Hub

1. Pull the image:

docker pull robvanderleek/capture-website-api

2. Start the container:

docker run -it -p 8080:8080 robvanderleek/capture-website-api

3. Make screenshot test request:

curl 'localhost:8080/capture?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/' -o screenshot.png

Build the docker image and run it

1. Clone the repo:

git clone [email protected]:robvanderleek/capture-website-api.git && cd capture-website-api

2. Build the image:

docker build -t cwa .

3. Start the container:

docker run -it -p 8080:8080 cwa

4. Make screenshot test request:

curl 'localhost:8080/capture?url=https://www.youtube.com' -o screenshot.png

Yarn

Run in a terminal:

1. Clone the repo:

git clone [email protected]:robvanderleek/capture-website-api.git && cd capture-website-api

2. Install dependencies:

yarn

3. Start the server:

yarn start

4. Make screenshot test request:

curl 'localhost:8080/capture?url=https://www.reddit.com' -o screenshot.png

Heroku

Deploy and run on Heroku:

1. Clone the repo:

git clone [email protected]:robvanderleek/capture-website-api.git && cd capture-website-api

2. Login to the Heroku container repository:

heroku container:login

3. Create repository entry:

heroku create

4. Push container:

heroku container:push web

5. Release container:

heroku container:release web

6. Get Heroku endpoint:

CWA_URL=$(heroku info -s | grep web_url | cut -d= -f2) 

7. Make screenshot test request:

curl "${CWA_URL}capture?url=https://www.linkedin.com" -o screenshot.png

Usage

Call the /capture endpoint and pass the site URL using the query parameters url:

$ curl 'https://capture-website-api.herokuapp.com/capture?url=http://gmail.com' -o screenshot.png

Simple as that.

Configuration

Application options

Application configuration options can be set as environment veriables or in a .env file in the root folder. There's an example .env file in the codebase: .env.example

Supported options are:

Capturing options

Most of the configuration options from the wrapped capture-website library are supported using query parameters. For example, to capture a site with a 650x350 viewport, no default background and animations disabled use:

curl 'https://capture-website-api.herokuapp.com/capture?url=http://amazon.com&width=650&height=350&scaleFactor=1&defaultBackground=false&disableAnimations=true' -o screenshot.png

See https://github.com/sindresorhus/capture-website for a full list of options.

Use plain Puppeteer

Sometimes the capture-website library has problems capturing sites. You can try to capture these sites with plain Puppeteer by supplying the query parameter plainPuppeteer=true

Environment variables

This app looks at two environment variables:

• SHOW_RESULTS: if true the latest capture result can be viewed in the browser by browsing the base url (e.g.: https://capture-website-api.herokuapp.com/)
• SECRET: when set all capture requests need to contain a query parameter secret whose value matches the value of this environment variable

Contributing

If you have suggestions for improvements, or want to report a bug, open an issue!

License

ISC © 2019 Rob van der Leek [email protected] (https://twitter.com/robvanderleek)