Phancap: Your own website screenshot service

Website screenshot
Full page screenshot

My bookmark manager SemanticScuttle is able to show screenshots for bookmarked websites, but always relied on an external service to generate them. The service shut down now - time to look for an alternative.

There are several dozen screenshot services on the internet; some have free plans that would allow you to re-enable screenshots on your self-hosted SemanticScuttle instance for free. But unfortunately this means registering at yet another service and being again dependent. Time for something new!

phancap

Over the last three weeks, I built phancap - a self-hosted website screenshot service. With it, your bookmark manager will never have to depend on an external service again.

It's easy to setup: Simply drop the .phar in your webserver's document root, install xvfb-run, cutycapt and imagemagick, and you're done.

It supports JPG, PNG and PDF output formats. PNG is ideal for screenshots, while full-text PDF is nice for long-time archiving of web pages.

You may configure the browser and thumbnail size, and can choose between a fixed height and full-page screenshots. Authentication may be enabled to prevent others using your server resources.

Download it or grab the source code (github mirror).

Written by Christian Weiske.

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