🚀 Daily Digest: AI APIs and React’s Full-Stack Future: What Every Developer Should Know

Daily Issue #25

• 10 Artificial Intelligence APIs for Developers

• React is (becoming) a Full-Stack Framework

• Data Fetching with Server Actions in Next.js

• How to Keep Learning as a Busy Software Engineer

• brain.js - GPU accelerated Neural networks in JavaScript for Browsers and Node.js

• paint-by-text - Modify images by chatting with a generative AI model

• ell - A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash

• VineJS - a form data validation library for Node.js

Act as an AI Writing Tutor

Building an API Service to Capture Website Screenshots with Puppeteer and Node.js

Problem: I wanted to create an API service that would capture a screenshot of a website when a URL is passed as a parameter in the request.

Solution: After exploring several options, I chose to implement the service using Puppeteer with Node.js to generate screenshots from any provided URL.

const express = require('express');
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
const app = express();
const port = 3000;

// Screenshot endpoint
app.get('/screenshot', async (req, res) => {
    const { url } = req.query;

    if (!url) {
        return res.status(400).send('Please provide a URL');
    }

    try {
        const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
            args: ['--no-sandbox', '--disable-setuid-sandbox']
        });
        const page = await browser.newPage();
        await page.goto(url, { waitUntil: 'networkidle2' });
        const screenshot = await page.screenshot({ fullPage: true });

        await browser.close();

        res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'image/png');
        res.send(screenshot);
    } catch (error) {
        console.error(error);
        res.status(500).send('Error capturing screenshot');
    }
});

app.listen(port, () => {
    console.log(`Puppeteer Screenshot API is running on http://localhost:${port}`);
});

Keywords: Puppeteer screenshot API, Node.js web scraping, dynamic screenshot service, web automation, URL to screenshot, website rendering, Puppeteer in production.

If you have built anything that you’d like to share with the community, get with me on X @dailysandbox_ 😀