shot-scraper

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Tool for taking automated screenshots

For background on this project see shot-scraper: automated screenshots for documentation, built on Playwright on my blog.

Demo

A live demo of the output of this tool can be found in the shot-scraper-demo repository.

Installation

Install this tool using pip:

pip install shot-scraper

This tool depends on Playwright, which first needs to install its own dedicated browser.

Run shot-scraper install once to install that:

% shot-scraper install
Downloading Playwright build of chromium v965416 - 117.2 Mb [====================] 100% 0.0s 
Playwright build of chromium v965416 downloaded to /Users/simon/Library/Caches/ms-playwright/chromium-965416
Downloading Playwright build of ffmpeg v1007 - 1.1 Mb [====================] 100% 0.0s 
Playwright build of ffmpeg v1007 downloaded to /Users/simon/Library/Caches/ms-playwright/ffmpeg-1007

Taking a screenshot

To take a screenshot of a web page and write it to screenshot.png run this:

shot-scraper https://datasette.io/ -o screenshot.png

If you omit the -o the screenshot PNG binary will be output by the tool, so you can pipe it or redirect it to a file:

shot-scraper https://datasette.io/ > datasette.png

The browser window used to take the screenshots defaults to 1280px wide and 780px tall.

You can adjust these with the --width and --height options:

shot-scraper https://datasette.io/ -o small.png --width 400 --height 800

If you provide both options, the resulting screenshot will be of that size. If you omit --height a full page length screenshot will be produced (the default).

To take a screenshot of a specific element on the page, use --selector or -s with its CSS selector:

shot-scraper https://simonwillison.net/ -s '#bighead' -o bighead.png

When using --selector the height and width, if provided, will set the size of the browser window when the page is loaded but the resulting screenshot will still be the same dimensions as the element on the page.

Sometimes a page will not have completely loaded before a screenshot is taken. You can use --wait X to wait the specified number of milliseconds after the page load event has fired before taking the screenshot:

shot-scraper https://simonwillison.net/ --wait 2000 -o after-wait.png

You can use custom JavaScript to modify the page after it has loaded (after the ‘onload’ event has fired) but before the screenshot is taken using the --javascript option:

shot-scraper https://simonwillison.net/ -o simonwillison-pink.png \
  --javascript "document.body.style.backgroundColor = 'pink';"

Screenshots default to PNG. You can save as a JPEG by specifying a -o filename that ends with .jpg.

You can also use --quality X to save as a JPEG with the specified quality, in order to reduce the filesize. 80 is a good value to use here:

shot-scraper https://simonwillison.net/ \
  -h 800 -o simonwillison.jpg --quality 80
% ls -lah simonwillison.jpg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 simon  staff   168K Mar  9 13:53 simonwillison.jpg

Taking multiple screenshots

You can configure multiple screenshots using a YAML file. Create a file called shots.yml that looks like this:

- output: example.com.png
  url: http://www.example.com/
- output: w3c.org.png
  url: https://www.w3.org/

Then run the tool like so:

shot-scraper multi shots.yml

This will create two image files, example.com.png and w3c.org.png, containing screenshots of those two URLs.

To take a screenshot of just the area of a page defined by a CSS selector, add selector to the YAML block:

- output: bighead.png
  url: https://simonwillison.net/
  selector: "#bighead"

To execute JavaScript after the page has loaded but before the screenshot is taken, add a javascript key:

- output: bighead-pink.png
  url: https://simonwillison.net/
  selector: "#bighead"
  javascript: |
    document.body.style.backgroundColor = 'pink'

You can include desired height, width, quality and wait options on each item as well:

- output: simon-narrow.jpg
  url: https://simonwillison.net/
  width: 400
  height: 800
  quality: 80
  wait: 500

Development

To contribute to this tool, first checkout the code. Then create a new virtual environment:

cd shot-scraper
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Or if you are using pipenv:

pipenv shell

Now install the dependencies and test dependencies:

pip install -e '.[test]'

To run the tests:

pytest

GitHub

View Github