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
• shot-scraper install --help
• 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
• shot-scraper auth --help
• Taking multiple screenshots
• shot-scraper multi --help
• 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
• shot-scraper pdf --help
• Dumping the HTML of a page
• Retrieving the HTML for a specific element
• shot-scraper html --help
• Dumping out an accessibility tree
• shot-scraper accessibility --help
• Using shot-scraper with GitHub Actions
• shot-scraper-template
• Building a workflow from scratch
• Optimizing PNGs using Oxipng
• Contributing
• Documentation
• Tweeting the release notes

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-scraper running 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-scraper and 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 javascript to scrape a web page. See Scraping web pages from the command-line with shot-scraper for details of how this works.