Screencapture with Perl on Linux (SOLVED)

sadarax has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

EDIT: Found a solution. Thanks everyone, particularly Corion.

A simple program to take a screencapture of a webpage in a web-browser (in this case Firefox).

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use warnings;
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize::Firefox;

my $url = "http://cmcc.deviantart.com";
my $outfile = "MyScreenshot.png";
my $telnet_max_buff_len = 10485760;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize::Firefox->new( launch => 'firefox',);

my $net_telnet = $mech->repl->repl->client; # Bridge deep into WWW:Tel
+net for finer control
$net_telnet->telnet->max_buffer_length($telnet_max_buff_len); # Enable
+ buffer size to handle large webpage

$mech->get($url); # Grab the content

my $png = $mech->content_as_png(); # Dump to a PNG file

open my $out, '>', $outfile
    or die "Couldn't create '$outfile': $!";
binmode $out; # Enable binary mode
print {$out} $png; # Write the file to disk
[download]

You will need to have WWW::Mechanize::Firefox installed (which can be done through cpan), and you will need to have the firefox addon MozRepl installed (http://wiki.github.com/bard/mozrepl). Module::Pluggable::Fast is, for some reason, not installable through the CPAN shell. You will need to download it separately and extract and install it manually by doing the following dance:

1. Download Module::Pluggable::Fast
2. Extract the tarball somewhere convenient
3. Open a shell in that directory
4. Type cpan . (including that dot)
5. Watch the module get installed
6. Retry installing WWW::Mechanize::Firefox

This should work. Thanks everyone again.

Comment on Screencapture with Perl on Linux (SOLVED) Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Screencapture with Perl on Linux by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 05, 2009 at 14:26 UTC
I use my module, WWW::Mechanize::Firefox to take screenshots of webpages.	[reply]
Re^2: Screencapture with Perl on Linux by LanX (Saint) on Dec 05, 2009 at 16:06 UTC
AFAI understand the docs, there are two ways to achieve this: One has to either know the geometry of the window (I suppose by evaluating `window.innerWidth` ... ?) to clip it completely `$mech->content_as_png [TAB, COORDINATES]` [download] or to get the "html"-tag element (`document.getElementsByTagName()`) to use `$mech->element_as_png $element` [download] correct? Or is there a more straight forward way, like skipping COORDINATES defaults to clipping the whole window? If not, wouldn't this be a reasonable feature request? 8) Cheers Rolf	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Screencapture with Perl on Linux by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 05, 2009 at 16:12 UTC
In the respository, there now is `screenshot.pl`, which captures the screen. And both, the tab and the coordinates are optional. What follows is the meat of the used code: #!perl -w use strict; use WWW::Mechanize::Firefox; use Getopt::Long; use Pod::Usage; GetOptions( 'mozrepl\|m:s' => \my $mozrepl, 'outfile\|o:s' => \my $outfile, ) or pod2usage(); $outfile \|\|= 'screenshot.png'; my @args; if (! @ARGV) { push @args, tab => 'current'; # this needs 0.13 or higher }; my $mech = WWW::Mechanize::Firefox->new( launch => 'firefox', @args ); if (@ARGV) { $mech->get($ARGV[0]); }; my $png = $mech->content_as_png(); open my $out, '>', $outfile or die "Couldn't create '$outfile': $!"; binmode $out; print {$out} $png; [download] I'm not sure how I could make it clearer in the documentation that all parameters to `->content_as_png` are optional, most likely I'll add a reference to `screenshot.pl` in the next release. Other suggestions are welcome!	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: Screencapture with Perl on Linux by LanX (Saint) on Dec 05, 2009 at 16:19 UTC
Re^5: Screencapture with Perl on Linux by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 05, 2009 at 16:33 UTC
Re^4: Screencapture with Perl on Linux by sadarax (Sexton) on Dec 06, 2009 at 00:48 UTC
Re^5: Screencapture with Perl on Linux by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 06, 2009 at 08:35 UTC
Some notes below your chosen depth have not been shown here
Re: Screencapture with Perl on Linux by Khen1950fx (Canon) on Dec 05, 2009 at 13:36 UTC
I used IPC::System::Simple. I took a screenshot of CNN, and everything was there. `#!/usr/local/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use IPC::System::Simple qw(capture); my $url = 'http://www.cnn.com'; system("firefox", $url); sleep 30; $url = capture("import -window root MyScreenshot.png"); print $url, "\n";` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Screencapture with Perl on Linux by sadarax (Sexton) on Dec 06, 2009 at 00:20 UTC
Thanks for the effort, but tried it and it did not work. Depending on which number of desktop I execute the script from (run from a terminal), it just takes a picture of the my desktop background or I get a blank screen with the windows borders	[reply]
Re: Screencapture with Perl on Linux by LanX (Saint) on Dec 05, 2009 at 13:44 UTC
My suggestion is to use the proper window ID of your FF. Anyway it's not working 100% from shell on my Ubuntu/Gnome box, parts of the images are always broken. But since this is not a perl issue, you should better ask in a linux forum or report to ImageMagick. Cheers Rolf UPDATE: contact	[reply]
Re: Screencapture with Perl on Linux by stefbv (Priest) on Dec 05, 2009 at 13:28 UTC
The code is working fine for me, when runing the script from the command line (on Slackware).	[reply]
Re: Screencapture with Perl on Linux by LanX (Saint) on Dec 06, 2009 at 22:42 UTC
maybe you can do it with xv... I remember doing screenshots with it but I'm not sure if it's scriptable. Probably you can determine if the problem comes from ImageMagick or the underlying Ubuntu / X system. Cheers Rolf	[reply]