How to Take a Website Screenshot with PHP

I want to walk you through the full process of taking website screenshots from PHP today. Not theory, not a library overview -- the actual thing. Open a terminal, install dependencies, write code, run it, get a PNG file with a screenshot. The whole path from an empty folder to a working result. Why would you even need this? Link previews for a directory site, automated OG images, screenshots for client reports, visual monitoring. Sooner or later a PHP project needs to turn a URL into an image. The problem is that PHP can't render web pages on its own. There's no browser engine built in. So we'll need a helper -- headless Chrome through Puppeteer. It's a Node.js package, and yes, that means we need Node alongside PHP. Sounds like overkill, but you'll see it's not that bad. Let's try it. Installing Node.js First things first -- we need Node.js. Puppeteer won't run without it. If you're on macOS with Homebrew, one command: brew install node On Ubuntu it's a bit longer: curl -fsSL https://