Instant Website Screenshot API

This Actor is a production-ready template for taking website screenshots using Puppeteer. It's built on the PuppeteerCrawler framework from Crawlee, which uses headless Chrome to handle JavaScript-heavy websites. It's designed for automation and developer workflows.

Key Features

• Puppeteer Crawler: Parallel crawling of web pages using headless Chrome, capable of executing JavaScript.
• Configurable Proxy: Built-in proxy management using Apify Proxy or custom proxies to avoid IP blocking.
• Input Schema: A defined schema validates and documents the required input parameters.
• Structured Output: Results are stored in a structured Apify Dataset for easy retrieval.
• Customizable Logic: The request handling is routed through a customizable routes.js file, allowing you to define specific behaviors for different URLs.

How to Use

The Actor's logic is centered around a PuppeteerCrawler instance. Here's the core flow:

1. Input: The Actor fetches its configuration (like start URLs) from INPUT.json.
2. Proxy Setup: It creates a ProxyConfiguration to manage proxy rotation, which is passed to the crawler.
3. Crawler Initialization: A PuppeteerCrawler is instantiated with the proxy config and a requestHandler.
4. Request Handling: The requestHandler uses a router (defined in routes.js) to process pages. You can add default handlers for all pages and specific handlers for certain URL patterns.
5. Execution: The crawler runs with the provided start URLs.

Example of a custom handler in routes.js:

router.addHandler('detail', async ({ request, page, log }) => {
    const title = await page.title();
    // Add your screenshot or data extraction logic here
    await Dataset.pushData({
        url: request.loadedUrl,
        title,
    });
});

Input / Output

Input: The Actor expects an INPUT.json file. The input schema defines the required parameters, typically including an array of startUrls to screenshot or crawl.

Output: The Actor stores its results in an Apify Dataset. Each item in the dataset is a structured object containing the data extracted from the page, such as the URL, page title, and any custom data (like screenshot information) you configure it to capture.

Resources

• Crawlee + Apify Platform guide
• PuppeteerCrawler Documentation and Examples
• Apify SDK Documentation
• How to scale Puppeteer and Playwright