A command-line utility for taking automated screenshots of websites
Quick start:
pip install shot-scraper
shot-scraper install
shot-scraper https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper -h 900
Produces this screenshot in a file called github-com-simonw-shot-scraper.png:
Contents
- Installation
- Taking a screenshot
- Adjusting the browser width and height
- Screenshotting a specific area with CSS selectors
- Specifying elements using JavaScript filters
- Waiting for a delay
- Waiting until a specific condition
- Executing custom JavaScript
- Using JPEGs instead of PNGs
- Retina images
- Transparent background
- Interacting with the page
- Logging all requests
- Taking screenshots of local HTML files
- Tips for executing JavaScript
- Viewing console.log() output
shot-scraper shot --help- Websites that need authentication
- Taking multiple screenshots
- Scraping pages using JavaScript
- Running more than one statement
- Using async/await
- Running JavaScript from a file
- Using this for automated tests
- Example: Extracting page content with Readability.js
- shot-scraper javascript –help
- Saving a web page to PDF
- Dumping the HTML of a page
- Dumping out an accessibility tree
- Using shot-scraper with GitHub Actions
- Contributing
shot-scraper
A command-line utility for taking automated screenshots of websites
For background on this project see shot-scraper: automated screenshots for documentation, built on Playwright.
Documentation
- Full documentation for shot-scraper
- Tutorial: Automating screenshots for the Datasette documentation using shot-scraper
- Release notes
Get started with GitHub Actions
To get started without installing any software, use the shot-scraper-template template to create your own GitHub repository which takes screenshots of a page using shot-scraper. See Instantly create a GitHub repository to take screenshots of a web page for details.
Quick installation
You can install the shot-scraper CLI tool using pip:
pip install shot-scraper
# Now install the browser it needs:
shot-scraper install
Taking your first screenshot
You can take a screenshot of a web page like this:
shot-scraper https://datasette.io/
This will create a screenshot in a file called datasette-io.png.
Many more options are available, see Taking a screenshot for details.
Examples
- The shot-scraper-demo repository uses this tool to capture recently spotted owls in El Granada, CA according to this page, and to generate an annotated screenshot illustrating a Datasette feature as described in my blog.
- The Datasette Documentation uses screenshots taken by
shot-scraperrunning in the simonw/datasette-screenshots GitHub repository, described in detail in Automating screenshots for the Datasette documentation using shot-scraper. - Ben Welsh built @newshomepages, a Twitter bot that uses
shot-scraperand GitHub Actions to take screenshots of news website homepages and publish them to Twitter. The code for that lives in palewire/news-homepages. - scrape-hacker-news-by-domain uses
shot-scraper javascriptto scrape a web page. See Scraping web pages from the command-line with shot-scraper for details of how this works.