Taking image of a webpage via a Linux (Ubuntu) server without UI installed

Question

I am looking for a webservice (API) or an application that I can install on my Linux Ubuntu server to take screenshot of webpages with a given URL.

I did not install any GUI on my server... Should I? Or is there a way around having to install a GUI?

Or is there a good API that I can use?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

You've got plenty of webservices to take screenshots of a given URL.

• http://browsershots.org/ but it's quite slow
• http://www.bounceapp.com/ quite fast, but it seems there is no API; you may still write some code to get the result screenshot (warning: it's medium-quality compressed JPEG)
• http://www.thumbalizr.com/ is a well known service and has an API

You may also use your own server-side software to generate screenshots. PhantomJS is able to do so (including JS and SVG support) and, starting from version 1.5, no X server is needed.