Run the ShotFactory on a separate user account

It is highly recommended to run the screenshot factory script on a separate user account, for the following reasons:

• Your personal files are safe from privacy exploits.
• Your personal browsing history and bookmarks don't appear in the screenshots.
• On Linux, you can use your browsers simultaneously with a separate user.
• The separate account can be unprivileged (no Administrator permissions).

Here's how:

On Linux

Create an unprivileged user account. You can use any name that you like. Then login as that user. The -X is for X11 forwarding, so that you can start browsers without a VNC server too.

$ sudo adduser shotfactory1
$ ssh -X shotfactory1@localhost

Install the shotfactory source code (both versions 0.3 and 0.4 are shown below):

$ svn checkout http://svn.browsershots.org/trunk/shotfactory
$ svn checkout http://svn.browsershots.org/branches/shotfactory-django

Then go into the source code directory and run the ShotFactory from there:

$ cd shotfactory # (or shotfactory-django for 0.4)
$ python shotfactory.py -h # Show help screen
$ screen -L python shotfactory.py

The screen command will create a virtual terminal that keeps running even when you log out. The -L creates a logfile, usually screenlog.0 with the complete output (in addition to the normal shotfactory.log with error messages).

You can close the screen with Ctrl-A Ctrl-D and later run screen -rd to connect to it again.