There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.
Manet is a REST API server which allows capturing screenshots of websites using various parameters. It is a good way to make sure that your websites are responsive or to make thumbnails.
Manet could use different engines to work: SlimerJS or PhantomJs.
- SlimerJS runs on top of Gecko (the browser engine of Mozilla Firefox) and SpiderMonkey (the JavaScript engine of Firefox).
- PhantomJS runs on top of WebKit and JavaScriptCore.
Project was named in honor of Édouard Manet, French painter (1832-1883). He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, and a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.
- Ready-To-Use
- Supporting SlimerJS and PhantomJS
- Configurable CLI application
- Flexible REST API
- File caching
- Various image formats
- Sandbox UI
Choose and install needed engine (PhantomJS, SlimerJS, or both of them):
- You can download SlimerJS from the official site and install manually.
- or you can use the power of NPM:
npm install -g slimerjsGecko, the rendering engine of Firefox, cannot render web content without a graphical window, but you can launch SlimerJS with xvfb if you are under linux or MacOSx, to have a headless SlimerJS, so it is also necessary to install Xvfb (X virtual framebuffer) for *nix or OS X systems.
For example, you can use apt-get to install xvfb on Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install xvfb- You can download PhantomJS from the official site and install manually.
- or you can also use NPM:
npm install -g phantomjsIMPORTANT: PhantomJS is used by default (see default.json file).
After preliminaries operations you can install Manet using NPM:
npm install -g manetThat is all, now you can start and use Manet server. As you can see, it is unnecessary to clone Git repository or something else.
Server launching is a simple as possible:
manetIf everything is OK, you should see the following message:
info: Manet server started on port 8891
Manet server uses hierarchical configurations to cover differnet usage use-cases:
- Command-line parameters
- Environment variables
- Built-in configuration JSON file ("config/default.json")
Rules of overriding:
- Each configuration level could be overridden by another level.
- The most-priority parameters are command-line parameters.
- The less-priority parameters are stored in build-in configuration file.
- --port
- Web server port number. REST API and UI will be available on this port (default: 8891).
- --engine
- Engine for screenshot capturing: "phantomjs" or "slimerjs" (default is "slimerjs"). Specific command will be detected by configuration file (default.json) using engine parameter and OS platform.
- --command
- Configuration file "default.json" supports specific commands for different platforms (ex: "linux": "xvfb-run -a slimerjs"). Needed command will be detected in runtime by platform/OS. This parameter allows to override command for executing SlimerJS. It allows using full power of SlimerJS command line options to configure proxy, SSL protocol, etc. More information could be found here: http://docs.slimerjs.org/current/configuration.html
IMPORTANT: This parameter overrides "--engine" parameter. - --storage
- File storage for cache (default is global temp directory).
- --cache
- Lifetime for file cache in seconds. Screenshots are cached for *60 minutes by default*, so that frequent requests for the same screenshot don't slow the service down. You can configure longer life for cache items or make them ethereal (use no-positive value, <= 0)
- --silent
- Run Manet server with or without logging information (default is false).
- --level
- Setting the level for your logging message. Possible values: debug, info, silly, warn, error (default is "debug").
- --cors
- Enable Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (default is false).
- --ui
- Enable or disable sandbox UI (default is true).
- --timeout
- Number of milliseconds to wait for the program to complete before sending it `SIGTERM` (default is 60000).
- --options:{option}
- Default query parameters. See also "Query parameters" for more details. Example: "--options:width 101"
Built-in configuration could be found in manet directory. For example, on Ubuntu it is located here: "/usr/local/lib/node_modules/manet/".
Default configuration file ("default.json"):
{
"cache": 3600,
"port": 8891,
"cors": false,
"ui": true,
"silent": false,
"level": "debug",
"engine": "phantomjs",
"timeout": 60000,
"commands": {
"slimerjs": {
"linux": "xvfb-run -a slimerjs",
"freebsd": "xvfb-run -a slimerjs",
"sunos": "xvfb-run -a slimerjs",
"darwin": "slimerjs",
"win32": "slimerjs.bat"
},
"phantomjs": {
"linux": "phantomjs",
"freebsd": "phantomjs",
"sunos": "phantomjs",
"darwin": "phantomjs",
"win32": "phantomjs"
}
},
"whitelist": [
".*"
]
}REST API is available on "/" using:
- GET method
- POST method with
Content-Type:- application/json
- or application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Few rules:
- The
"url"parameter must be specified. - Query parameters will be used in priority and override others.
- url
- Website address (URL). This is the only required parameter for the HTTP request. It is unnecessary for the most cases to configure scheme. Example: "github.com".
- width
- This property allows to change the width of the viewport, e.g., the size of the window where the webpage is displayed (default: 1024)
- height
- This property allows to change the height of the viewport. If width is defined and height is not defined, than full page will be captured.
- clipRect
- This property defines the rectangular area of the web page to be rasterized. Format: "top,left,width,height", example: "20,20,640,480".
- zoom
- Zoom factor of the webpage display. Setting a value to this property decreases or increases the size of the web page rendering. A value between 0 and 1 decreases the size of the page, and a value higher than 1 increases its size. 1 means no zoom (normal size). (default: 1).
- quality
- The compression quality. A number between 0 and 1 (default value: 1).
- delay
- Do a pause during the given amount of time (in milliseconds) after page opening (default: 100).
- format
- Indicate the file format for output image (default is "png"). Possible values: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf
- agent
- String to define the "User-Agent" in HTTP requests. By default, it is something like:
- PhantomJS: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.34 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/1.9.0 (development) Safari/534.34
- SlimerJS: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 SlimerJS/0.7
- headers
- This property specifies additional HTTP request headers that will be sent to the server for every request issued (for pages and resources). Format: "key1=value1;key2=value2;..." Headers names and values get encoded in US-ASCII before being sent. Please note that setting the 'User-Agent' will overwrite the value set via "agent" parameter.
- user
- User name to give to HTTP Basic authentication.
- password
- Password to give to HTTP Basic authentication.
- js
- false to deactivate javascript in web pages (default is true).
- images
- false to deactivate the loading of images (default is true).
- force
- Use the force reloading of web page without using cache (default is false).
- callback
- Return an empty response immediately (HTTP 200 OK), then send a POST request to the callback URL when the screenshot is ready (with image in the body).
For a quick test with the command line (using curl), type:
curl http://localhost:8891/?url=github.com > github.png
curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"url":"github.com"}' http://localhost:8891/ > github.png
curl -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" -d 'url=github.com' http://localhost:8891/ > github.pngor (using wget)
wget http://localhost:8891/?url=github.com -O github.pngHere are some query examples that could be executed by any REST API client:
# Take a screenshot of the github.com.
GET /?url=github.com
# Custom viewport size. Return a 800x600 PNG screenshot of the github.com homepage.
GET /?url=github.com&width=800&height=600
# Clipping Rectangle. Return a screenshot clipped at [top=20, left=30, width=90, height=80]
GET /?url=github.com&clipRect=20%2C30%2C90%2C80
# Zoom rendered page in 2 times.
GET /?url=github.com&zoom=2
# Specify image output format.
GET /?url=github.com&format=jpeg
# Disable JavaScript. Return a screenshot with no JavaScript executed.
GET /?url=github.com&js=false
# Disable images. Return a screenshot without images.
GET /?url=github.com&images=false
# Custom User Agent.
GET /?url=github.com&agent=Mozilla%2F5.0+(X11%3B+Linux+x86_64)+AppleWebKit%2F537.36+(KHTML%2C+like+Gecko)+Chrome%2F34.0.1847.132+Safari%2F537.36
# HTTP Basic Authentication. Return a screenshot of a website requiring basic authentication.
GET /?url=mysite.com&user=john&password=smith
# Screenshot delay. Return a screenshot of the github.com homepage 1 second after it's loaded.
GET /?url=github.com&delay=1000
# Force page reloading. Return a screenshot without using file cache.
GET /?url=github.com&force=true
# Specify custom HTTP headers.
GET /?url=google.com&headers=User-Agent=Firefox;Accept-Charset=utf-8
# Asynchronous call.
GET /?url=github.com&callback=http://localhost:8891
Sandbox UI is available on "/" by direct GET request without "url" query parameter.
It is a simple playground to build HTTP requests and try them.
Demo instance is available on Heroku: https://manet.herokuapp.com
- To install project dependencies:
npm install- To run jshint checks:
npm run lint- To run Mocha unit tests:
# using NPM:
npm test
# using mocha and watcher:
mocha --watch -R spec- To run Manet server:
./bin/manet- SlimerJS author Laurent Jouanneau and SlimerJS community.
- PhantomJS author Ariya Hidayat and PhantomJS community.
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2014 Vladislav Bauer (see LICENSE).