Capturing the Screenshot of Websites using PHP and Linux

Wkhtmltoimage is a very useful application to create screenshots of a website or webpage. Sometimes we are required to create a screenshot of web pages and store in our system. It uses QT Webkit rendering engine for creating images in various formats. This article will help to capture screenshots of a webpage using PHP script and Linux command line.

Step 1: Install wkhtmltoimage

Visit the wkhtmltopdf.org and install and download the package for your Linux system. Then install it using the standard package manager. For example, to download and install the package on Ubuntu 22.04, execute:

wget https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/packaging/releases/download/0.12.6.1-2/wkhtmltox_0.12.6.1-2.jammy_amd64.deb 
sudo apt install -f ./wkhtmltox_0.12.6.1-2.jammy_amd64.deb 

Step 2: Capture Screenshot Using Command Line

First, check wkhtmltoimage script using the Linux command line. The following command will take a screenshot of http://google.com and create an image with the name google.jpg.

wkhtmltoimage --no-images --load-error-handling ignore http://google.com google.jpg 

Step 3: PHP Code to Create Image

Use the following PHP code to generate images from the website URL. This script required to be enabled the shell_exec function for Apache. Most shared hosting providers don’t allow this function.

Create a file name getImage.php and put below code:

Use the following syntax or demo URL to generate an image of the website.

Example:

https://example.net/getImage.php?url=http://google.com&img=image1.jpg

Step 4: PHP Script for SEO Friendly URL

If you want to create SEO friendly URL for this setup, you can use the below steps.

Create a few required directories in your web server document root

mkdir -p /var/www/html/getImage/images/ 

Create index.php file with the following content. Make sure all directory paths are correct,

Now create a .htaccess file in this directory to move all requests to the index.php file. make sure your server is enabled to use the .htaccess file.

vi /var/www/html/getImage/.htaccess 

Add the following content to the file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /images/.+(gif|png|jpg)$
RewriteRule .* – [L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php

Save the file and close it.

Now you can create images by accessing the URL below:

Syntax:

 http://youdomain.com/getImage/[imagename]/[site url without http prefix]

Example:

 https://tecadmin.net/getImage/123.jpg/yahoo.com