zeppelin-no / django-screamshot

Web pages capture using Django & CasperJS

django-screamshot is a very naive implementation of Web pages capture with CasperJS (aaAAaah!, phantomjs:))

(See the issues pages for more details about what remains to be done.)

INSTALL

First make sure you have the casperjs command in your PATH, using related installation instructions.

Then install the egg :

pip install django-screamshot

USAGE

• Add screamshot to your INSTALLED_APPS

As a screenshot Web API

Add it to your project URLs :

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    url(r'^capture/$',  include('screamshot.urls', namespace='screamshot', app_name='screamshot')),
)

You can then obtain a screenshot using the following GET parameters :

url

The website URL to capture. This can be a fully qualified URL, or the name of a URL to be reversed in your Django project.

selector

CSS3 selector (default: body)

method

HTTP method to be used (default: GET)

width

Viewport width (default: 1400)

height

Viewport height (default: 900)

data

HTTP data to be posted (default: {})

For example : http://server/capture/?url=http://django-fr.org&selector=h1&width=1024&height=768

As a template tag

You can include screenshots in your pages using a template tag. It will perform the capture and return the base64 version of the resulting image.

This is very useful if you don't want to expose the capture API publicly.

{% base64capture URL SELECTOR %}

For example, in a SVG template :

{% load screamshot %}
...

<image
   y="200"
   x="300"
   id="imagemap"
   xlink:href="data:{% base64capture "company:map" "#map" %}"
   width="640" />

If you run the capture server on a different instance, you can specify the root url for reversing (default is local) :

SCREAMSHOT_CONFIG = {
    'CAPTURE_ROOT_URL': 'http://127.0.0.1:8001',
}

Capture views with authentication

You can use Basic HTTP authentication in your Django project, create a dedicated user for screenshots and capture the full URL with credentials (http://user:password@host/page/).

Alternatively, you can use a specific view decorator.

Define the authorized IP to capture your pages in your settings :

SCREAMSHOT_CONFIG = {
    'CAPTURE_ALLOWED_IPS': ('127.0.0.1',),
}

And use the provided decorator :

from screamshot.decorators import login_required_capturable


@login_required_capturable
def your_view(request):
    ...

Extra-arguments for PhantomJS/CasperJS

You can specify extra-args, such as --disk-cache=true with the CLI_ARGS setting :

SCREAMSHOT_CONFIG = {
    'CLI_ARGS': ['--disk-cache=true', '--max-disk-cache-size=30000']
}

See related documentation on PhantomJS and CasperJS homepages.

Notes about runserver

If you want to test it using manage.py runserver, you won't be able to capture pages coming from the same instance.

Run it twice (on two ports) and configure CAPTURE_ROOT_URL.

AUTHORS

• Mathieu Leplatre <[email protected]>
• mozillag

LICENSE

• Lesser GNU Public License