katch!

a very simple wrapper utility for headless chrome to easily export any webpage as png, pdf or html (prerender), you can use it via http or cli. katch was created after revamping scraply to help in scraping client-side apps.

Use Cases

PDF generation (HTML to PDF)
Screenshots (HTML to an Image)
Prerendering (Javascript generated pages to HTML)

How it works?

it utilizes Google Chrome via its "remote debugging protocol" to perform the magic and exposes that magic through an API (CLI and HTTP)

Usage

# run katch server in a separate terminal window
$ katch serve --listen=:3000

a screenshot from google.com?

http://localhost:3000/export?format=png&url=https://google.com

a screenshot but with a custom screen size?

http://localhost:3000/export?format=png&viewport_width=1300&viewport_height=1600&url=https://google.com

a full-screen screenshot!

http://localhost:3000/export?format=png&png_full_page=true&url=https://google.com

a pdf?

http://localhost:3000/export?format=pdf&pdf_print_background=true&pdf_landscape=false&pdf_paper_height=25&pdf_paper_width=20&viewport_width=1300&viewport_height=1600&url=https://google.com

as raw html?

http://localhost:3000/export?format=html&url=https://google.com

limit execution time to 5 seconds?

http://localhost:3000/export?format=pdf&max_exec_time=5&viewport_width=1300&viewport_height=1600&url=https://google.com

scroll vertically by 100 pixels (scroll 1 time by 100 pixels vertically), you can do an infinity scroll by setting scroll_times=-1 !.

http://localhost:3000/export?format=png&url=https://youtube.com&scroll_step=100&scroll_times=1

NOTE: you can post JSON payload to the same endpoint with the same query params names above.

NOTE: for cli usage, please run $ katch help

Download ?

you can go to the releases page and pick the latest version. or you can $ docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/alash3al/katch katch help

Contribution ?

for sure you can contribute, how?

clone the repo
create your fix/feature branch
create a pull request

nothing else, enjoy!

About

I'm Mohamed Al Ashaal, a software engineer :)