Banquo

Banquo builds off of Depict, a node library designed to use PhantomJS to take screenshots of interactive visualizations. Banquo is slightly different in that it is built to be called on a Node.js server and returns a base64-encoded version of the screenshot as jsonp, as opposed to saving the screenshot to a file.

As a result, Banquo doesn't run on the command line, as Depict does, but instead is called like the example below from another Node.js script.

NOTE: As of Banquo 0.3.0, it no longer requires you to install PhantomJs separately.

Installation

You'll generally install this as a dependency in your package.json.

npm install banquo --save

If you want to install it without adding it to your package.json, run the command above without --save.

Usage

You can set up your own service with banquo by cloning banquo-server.

Note: Banquo server uses an older version of Banquo. Pull request welcome.

Here's a basic standalone setup:

var banquo = require('banquo');

var opts = {
    mode: 'base64',
    url: 'america.aljazeera.com',
    viewport_width: 1440,
    delay: 1000,
    selector: '#articleHighlightList-0'
};

banquo.capture(opts, function(err, imageData){
    if (err) {
     console.log(err)
    }
    console.log(imageData);
});

Or if mode is save and scrape is true you get the body markup. This behavior will be standardized in future versions so that just by setting scrape to true you'll get a third argument of the bodyMarkup. Pull request welcome.

var banquo = require('banquo');

var opts = {
    mode: 'save',
    url: 'america.aljazeera.com',
    viewport_width: 1440,
    delay: 1000,
    selector: '#articleHighlightList-0',
    scrape: true
};

banquo.capture(opts, function(err, bodyMarkup){
    if (err) {
     console.log(err)
    }
    console.log(bodyMarkup);
});

Options

Key | Required | Default | Options | Description --- | --- | --- | --- | --- mode |no| base64 | save or base64 | The former will save a file to the out_file location and return a success string callback. The latter will return the image as a base64 string. url |yes| null | String | The website you want to screenshot. viewport_width |no| 1440 | Number (Pixels) | The desired browser width. Settings this to a higher number will increase processing time. viewport_height |no| 900 | Number (Pixels) | The desired browser height. Settings this to a higher number will increase processing time. May be useful with long scrolls in fixed height containers. delay |no| 1000 | Number (Milliseconds) | How long to wait after the page has loaded before taking the screenshot. PhantomJS apparently waits for the page to load but if you have a map or other data calculations going on, you'll need to specify a wait time. selector |no| body | String (CSS selector) | The div you want to screenshot. css_hide |no| null | String (CSS selector) | Any divs you want to hide, such as zoom buttons on map. Defaults to none. out_file |no| './image_%Y-%m-%d.png' | String (File path)| The name and location of the image file you want to save. Defaults to image_ plus the ISO year, month, day. user_agent |no| null | String | Set a custom user-agent string. scrape |no| false | Boolean | If set to true and mode is save will return the HTML as a string. Does not work if mode is base64. custom_headers | no | null | JSON (headers) | JSON object of any custom headers - i.e. {"Authentication": "Basic MYTOKEN"}