Posted by olivM on Mon 10 Jul 2006 at 15:02
Despite being both great and free the online service thumbshots, which is used to create images of what a website looks like, can't be used for professional use. Here we'll demonstrate how to reproduce that service ourselves.
Here is how we'll create our own website screenshot service on a Debian stable server in less than 10 minutes.
First install vncserver, a simple desktop environment, a web browser and a tool to export images :
apt-get install vncserver xfonts-base xfce4 mozilla-firefox imagemagick
Start the vncserver service :
vncserver :1 -geometry 1024x768 -depth 24
Configure the desktop and browser to your own preferences. You'll probably wish to remove any unnecessary panels, session-managers, etc, and install some plugins for your browser:
killall x-session-manager ssh-agent xftaskbar4 xfdesktop xfce4-panel
Now you can open a session to your server's desktop environment to see how it's looking :
xvncviewer x.x.x.x:1 &
The next step is to create a simple script to take a screenshot of a given website. We'll call our script screenshot.sh, and give it the following contents:
#!/bin/bash export DISPLAY=":1" /usr/bin/firefox --display :1 "$1" > /dev/null 2> /dev/null & /bin/sleep 10 /usr/bin/import -window root -display :1 "$2" killall firefox-bin
The script can be called as follows:
./screenshot.sh http://www.debian-administration.org/ ~/debian_admin.jpg
That's it !
This article was inspired by Anton Titov's post on How to make site screenshots with linux server.
This article can be found online at the Debian Administration website at the following bookmarkable URL (along with associated comments):
This article is copyright 2006 olivM - please ask for permission to republish or translate.