Pagelapse

Generates time-lapses of websites, with ease. Inspirational background music not included.

For a short write-up of this project, check out the blog post I wrote about it.

Pagelapse needs phantomjs to take screenshots, so simply run:

$ brew install phantomjs

And then install pagelapse:

$ gem install pagelapse

To create a new pagelapse, add a Lapsefile to the current directory. If your timelapse is associated with a project, you may want to add this to the root directory of your project.

In the Lapsefile, you can specify (using Ruby) which pages you'd like to record. For instance, to record a screenshot of my blog, lord.io, every 10 seconds with a browser window 1000 pixels by 800 pixels:

record "lord", "http://www.lord.io/blog" do |r|
  r.width = 1000
  r.height = 800
  r.interval = 10
end

You can also run Capybara commands before the screenshot is taken:

record "github", "http://github.com/login" do |r|
  r.interval = 10
  r.before_capture do
    page.fill_in('login', :with => 'lord')
    page.fill_in('password', :with => 'my password here')
    page.click_button('Sign in')
  end
end

There are a couple other settings. The default behavior is capture pages only if they return a HTTP 200. You can change this by setting a capture_if, for instance if you only want to record if the page contains certain elements, or based on the status code:

record "lord", "http://www.lord.io/blog" do |r|
  r.capture_if do
    page.driver.status_code == 404
  end
end

For instance, the above code will only capture the page if a 404 error code was generated.

By default, new screenshots will be deleted if they are exactly the same as the previous screenshot. You can override this with save_if:

record "lord", "http://www.lord.io/blog" do |r|
  r.save_if do |old_file, new_file|
    # Add checking code here
    true
  end
end

For example, the code above will always save new screenshots. You could potentially use the old_file and new_file parameters passed (as file names) to the save_if block with Imagemagick or some other image program to determine if the images are different enough to save. The default method is to check the cryptographic hashes of the two files are the same.

To view the websites you've recorded in a nice web interface:

$ pagelapse view

Drag your cursor from left to right to play the timelapse.

1. Fork it ( http://github.com/lord/pagelapse/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request