Script To Make Webpage Snapshot

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Dear Experts,

Could someone recommend a script or utility one can run from command line on Linux or UNIX machine to make a snapshot of webpage?

We have a signage (xibo) and whoever creates/changes content, likes to add URLs of some webpages there. All works well if these are webpages on our servers (which are pretty fast), but some external servers often take time to respond and take time to assemble the page, in addition these servers sometimes get really busy, and when response is longer than time devoted for that content in signage window, this window hangs forever with blank white field until you restart client. Trivial workaround: just to get snapshot (as, say daily cron job), and point signage client to that snapshot definitely will solve it, and simultaneously we will stop bugging other people servers often without much need for it.

But when I tried to search for some utility or script that makes webpage snapshot, I discovered that my ability to search degraded somehow…

Thanks for all your pointers!

Valeri
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Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
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15 thoughts on - Script To Make Webpage Snapshot

  • Not an answer to the question you asked, but maybe this is a job for a caching proxy server like squid?

  • many/most webpages these days are heavily dynamic content, a static snapshot would likely break. plus any site-relative links on that snapshot would be pointing to your server, not the original, any ajax code on that webpage would try to interact with your server which won’t be running the right back end stuff, etcetc.

  • I usually am not good at explaining what I need. I really only need an image of what one would see in web browser if one point to that URL. I do not care it to be interactive. I also don’t want to get the content
    (“mirror”) of stuff that URL points to on variety of “depths” – I don’t want to use wget or curl for this reason. That is what I tried first and it breaks with at lest one of the web sites – they do seem protect themselves from “robots” or similar. And we don’t need it. We just need to show what they page shows today, that’s all.

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Thanks! It didn’t occur to me. It will be much more sophisticated than just an image “snapshot” of the webpage, but should solve our problem. If I don’t find anything doing “snapshot” successfully, this is what I will do.

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • line to add time snapshot (as, say daily cron job), and point signage client to that snapshot definitely will solve it, and simultaneously we will stop bugging snapshot would likely break. plus any site-relative links on that snapshot would be pointing to your server, not the original, any ajax code on that webpage would try to interact with your server which won’t be running the right back end stuff, etcetc. image of what one would see in web browser if one point to that URL. I
    do
    (“mirror”) of stuff that URL points to on variety of “depths” – I don’t want to use wget or curl for this reason. That is what I tried first and it breaks with at lest one of the web sites – they do seem protect themselves from “robots” or similar. And we don’t need it. We just need to

    This involves a person sitting with open web browser and clicking mouse. I
    need to do it for a few webpages once a day, as they change daily. I
    prefer to once spend time on making cron job, and forget about it forever. Hence I need it done from command line.

    Valeri

    attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.”

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Yes, I understand as much, thanks. I’m still sure it is not hopeless task.

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • First time on this list, sorry if I mess up on something.

    I use http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ there is a to image version as well. I
    haven’t had any trouble with it. I’ve mostly used on Windows but there are Linux versions.