banquo

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.
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.