Browsershot Alternative: A Drop-in Replacement for PHP Screenshot Generation

Browsershot Alternative: A Drop-in Replacement for PHP Screenshot Generation If you're a Laravel/PHP developer maintaining spatie/browsershot , you've felt the pain. 7,000+ GitHub stars. Zero updates since 2021. And every deployment, every new server, every shared hosting environment comes with the same problem: install headless Chrome without permissions . On shared hosting? Forget it. On AWS Lambda? You're adding 500MB to your function size just for a screenshot. On PaaS platforms like Heroku or Platform.sh? System binary dependencies are a nightmare. There's a simpler way. The Problem: Why Browsershot Breaks in Production Browsershot is a PHP wrapper around Puppeteer, which requires a headless Chrome binary. Here's what that means: Shared Hosting (the most painful scenario): # Your host doesn't have Chrome installed # You request root access... denied # You try to compile from source... permission denied # You give up and ship a broken feature Serverless (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Fu