Question

The problem is that I need capture web-site screenshots without running X server.

So theoretically it’s possible to create a virtual frame buffer and to use it to capture screenshot.

Is there any similar solutions, any advice would be appreciated?

Sultan

Answer 1

you can use a combination of Selenium WebDriver and pyvirtualdisplay (which uses xvfb) to run your browser in a virtual display and capture screenshots.

so, the setup you need is:

• Selenium Python bindings
• pyvirtualdisplay Python package (depends on xvfb)

On Debian/Ubuntu Linux systems, you can setup everything with:

• $ sudo apt-get install python-pip xvfb
• $ sudo pip install selenium

once you have it setup, the following code example should work:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
from selenium import webdriver

display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600))
display.start()

browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('http://www.google.com')
browser.save_screenshot('screenie.png')
browser.quit()

display.stop()

this will:

• launch a virtual display
• launch Firefox browser
• navigate to google.com
• capture a screenshot
• close the browser
• stop the virtual display