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PHP – 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 php 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 php within minutes using our REST API.

Take a screenshot of a website with PHP

Step 1) Install the PHP client library from github: https://github.com/Api2Pdf/api2pdf.php

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.

require_once 'your-own-directory/Api2Pdf.php';
$apiClient = new Api2Pdf('YOUR-API-KEY'); 

$result = $apiClient->chromeUrlToImage('https://www.api2pdf.com');
echo $result->getFile();

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 php code.

See full github library

We have a whole php 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.php