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Node / Javascript – take a screenshot of a website

Published Jul 14, 2021

Intro

You might need to convert a URL to an image, URL to PNG, or automatically take a screenshot of a website for various reasons. Maybe you are crawling websites and would like an image preview of all of them for a database. In either case, if you’re a nodejs developer and you have been doing research, you probably came across Headless Chrome or wkhtmltoimage. Working with either is a headache. Much easier to write just a few lines of code and call it a day. You can easily take a screenshot of a URL with javascript within minutes using our REST API.

Take a screenshot of a website with Node / Javascript

Step 1) Open up your package manager and run the command

npm install –save api2pdf

Step 2) Grab an API key from https://portal.api2pdf.com. Only takes 60 seconds.

Step 3) Use the sample code below and replace “YOUR-API-KEY” with the api key you acquired in step 2.

var Api2Pdf = require('api2pdf');   
var a2pClient = new Api2Pdf('YOUR-API-KEY');

a2pClient.chromeUrlToImage('https://www.api2pdf.com').then(function(result) { console.log(result); });

And that’s it! Modify the code as you see fit. Hopefully this saves you time and makes converting URLs to images easy and painless for those writing node / javascript code.

See full github library

We have a whole nodejs based client library for our API that does a lot more than just this. Check out the full library capabilities here: https://github.com/Api2Pdf/api2pdf.node