is it possible to render a webpage directly to an image in python?

Question

Now I am using selenium to save a web page to image.

from selenium import webdriver
browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get("some url")
browser.save_screenshot(img)
browser.quit()

But there is a problem that each time it will popup a window.

Is there any way that can render a image directly to an image?

Wavelength

if you use Linux/Unix and you're brave, you could experiment with running the web browser with Xvfb, an X11 server which renders images in memory without displaying them. – Fidele

Firefox's rendering engine Gecko can actually be used for "off-screen" rendering to a buffer. But trying to interface with Gecko from Python—especially since they stopped supporting Gecko embedding after 5.0, and never finished the samples—is a nightmare. You could do it by writing a XUL/JS app, running that in Firefox/XULRunner, then scripting that with Python. But it's still not going to be fun. – Topcoat

another option is to use Qt webkit bindings: linux.com/learn/docs/ldp/… – Shifflett

Thanks All, I found a solution as @AndreHolzner mentioned, #6183776 – Wavelength

@Wavelength did it actually work as expected? Please let us know. – Algophobia

@Algophobia , it save the image and not popup the window :) – Wavelength

@Wavelength good news, I guess. When we tried a while back we never got a good solution working, then again, it was on Windows machines, which probably make a difference. – Algophobia

You should consider answering your own question, now that you have found a solution. – Rag

Answer 1

I found a workaround at How do I run Selenium in Xvfb?

It works fine in linux.

from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
display.start()
browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get("some url")
browser.save_screenshot(img)
browser.quit()
display.stop()

Wavelength

Answer 2

You can use phantomjs

Here you can find a good tutorial: http://www.realpython.com/blog/python/headless-selenium-testing-with-python-and-phantomjs/#.UtFpiXMuKAg

Fite

Answer 3

Selenium can now do this without any other libraries by using the headless option

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options

options = Options()
options.headless = True
browser = webdriver.Firefox(options=options)
browser.set_window_size(1600,800)
browser.get('https://www.google.com')
browser.save_full_page_screenshot('./out.png')

browser.close()

Becquerel