Comments on: Xvfb and Firefox headless screenshot generator

By: Tom John

Tom John — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:55:42 +0000

Hi, if you were interested in using the WebKit engine (backs Safari and Google Chrome) over Firefox’s Gecko then check out webkit2png written in python.

There’s a blog post that covers it in detail http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/rotapken/2008/12/03/create-screenshots-of-a-web-page-using-python-and-qtwebkit/ and it seems to have been standardised as a PyPi package at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/webkit2png.

By: Ivan Villareal

Ivan Villareal — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:27:04 +0000

I’ve edited the settings with the about:config feature, after that I just saved the entire profile on the server and it was ready, besides that I used the imagemagick toolkit to crop the image

By: burak

burak — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:45:28 +0000

how did you get around with firefox menu bar, search bar and other gui related stuff ?

By: Ivan Villareal

Ivan Villareal — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:49:10 +0000

@methode
No I don’t think killing Xvfb had anything to do with this weird output you are getting, this is because I did a larger app and I’m killing Xvfb everytime I need to restart the process and I didn’t had this problem.

You can try to debug your issue by running manually every step, first run Xvfb and on a second terminal take a screenshot, if it looks ok, open firefox inside of that Xvfb session and take a screenshot again, an easier way to debug this is changing Xvfb to X, and do all your testing trough an ssh session, that way you can look how your script performs and get an idea of what is going wrong.

By: methode

methode — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:55:25 +0000

Excellent tutorial!

Ivan, a question: for some reason I get some weird colors instead of the real output when generating the image with import. I’m not sure why but I smell it’s because I killed Xvfb and that didn’t start up properly the next time. The interesting is, that for the first time I took the screenshot it all worked properly; so I wrote a bash script to start and stop (with kill) the X and export the image. I assume stopping the X was a very stupid idea.
So now I’m trying to fix these weird colors: http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/2qWs1qIeM1W7lMKIwoJnqQ?authkey=Gv1sRgCNeRqrGLyufi9AE&feat=directlink

Any idea on this?

By: Ivan Villareal

Ivan Villareal — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:54:45 +0000

browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash was set to false, what worked for me was to change some settings and add the extensions on another firefox instance and then copying all the .mozilla folder to the home directory of the user that will be running the Xvfb, I’ve also used an extension to make firefox tabless, because I didn’t found a way to close specific tabs.

By: Eric Clemmons

Eric Clemmons — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:39:25 +0000

What settings in the profile did you modify to prevent the “Firefox did not shutdown properly” errors?