How I Built a Website Screenshot API with FastAPI and Playwright

Ever needed to capture website screenshots programmatically? Maybe for generating link previews, monitoring visual changes, or building a testing pipeline? I built a Screenshot API that handles all of this with a single GET request. In this post, I'll walk through the architecture and how you can use it. The Problem Taking website screenshots sounds simple, but doing it reliably at scale is tricky: Sites use lazy loading, animations, and dynamic content Bot detection blocks headless browsers Different devices need different viewports Cookie banners and ads clutter the output You need to handle timeouts, errors, and edge cases Building this into every project is a waste of time. So I wrapped it all into one API. The Stack Python 3.13 + FastAPI for the web framework Playwright (Chromium) for headless browser rendering playwright-stealth to bypass bot detection Pillow for WebP conversion Pydantic for request validation How It Works A single long-lived Chromium process runs in the backgrou