Spooky!

I was tired of installing Phantom/Nightmare/etc everytime I needed a page screenshot feature for my 12-factor apps. The Blood Banya is a dummy screenshot service that uses pool of Nightmare.js renderers to increase the rendering speed. It can be self hosted.

Seting up Blood Banya on a hosted server

First, make sure your server has decent amount of swap enabled. Fresh servers usually come without any swap and it's really easy to forget to enable swap in a first place, which sometimes leads to hours of trying to figure out why npm install crashes. This DO article is a life saver!

Blood Banya uses Nightmare.js which is powered by Electron, so first thing you have to install is X11 framebuffer:

apt-get update &&\
    apt-get install -y libgtk2.0-0 libgconf-2-4 \
    libasound2 libxtst6 libxss1 libnss3 xvfb

# Launch framebuffer virtual display
Xvfb -ac -screen scrn 1280x2000x24 :9.0 &

Now launch Blood Banya:

npm install
DISPLAY=:9.0 PORT=80 NODE_ENV=production node --harmony index.js
# or if you prefer pm2:
DISPLAY=:9.0 PORT=80 pm2 start index.js —node-args='--harmony'

Stay tuned for more info! 🎃💀