viewkit

Real Safari screenshots of any URL, on real iOS Simulators. Both Safari surfaces that exist on iPhone — the Safari app, and the system in-app Safari view your links open in from Slack, Discord or Mail — across three iPhone sizes. One command, one gallery. Nothing emulated.

npx viewkit-cli https://your-site.com

Or run it bare for the interactive wizard (paste the URL, pick devices and views with the arrow keys):

npx viewkit-cli

The npm package is viewkit-cli; the installed binary is viewkit (so after npm i -g viewkit-cli the command is just viewkit).

Requirements

macOS with Xcode installed (the full app — it ships the iOS Simulators viewkit drives). Nothing else: no browser downloads, no accounts, no tunnels.

Usage

viewkit <url> [url2 ...] [options]
viewkit              # no URL, in a terminal: interactive wizard

--only <sel>     Comma list of devices, views, or profile names (default: all 6)
                 devices: iphone-se, iphone-15, iphone-15-pro-max
                 views:   safari, safari-view
--out <dir>      Output directory (default: ./shots)
--dark           Capture in system dark mode
--config <file>  JSON config (default: ./viewkit.config.json if present)
-h, --help       Show help

The two views

• safari — the Safari app: real toolbar, address bar, Dynamic Island, real safe areas.
• safari-view — the system in-app browser (SFSafariViewController): close button, centered host, share/reload bar. Slack, Discord, Telegram, Mail and every app using the system view present exactly this — so one capture covers all of them.

Examples

viewkit https://example.com                          # all 6 captures
viewkit https://example.com --only iphone-15         # one device, both views
viewkit https://example.com --only safari-view       # in-app view, all devices
viewkit "http://localhost:5173/?x=1" --dark          # local dev server, dark mode

Output: one <profile>.png per capture plus an index.html gallery grouped by view. Open shots/index.html to compare.

How it works

viewkit drives the iOS Simulator via xcrun simctl: boot (idempotent — simulators stay booted between runs; first run ~1 min, rest are seconds), pin the status bar to 9:41, set light/dark appearance, then:

• safari profiles open the URL in the Safari app (simctl openurl).
• safari-view profiles launch a tiny bundled harness app that presents the URL in a real SFSafariViewController. The harness compiles once with swiftc on first use and is cached in ~/.viewkit/harness.

Readiness is detected by polling the screen until it stops changing (baseline-aware, so a slow first paint is not mistaken for a settled page). Device mapping falls back to newer installed models (iPhone 15 → 16 → 17), so any recent Xcode works. xcrun simctl shutdown all when you're done.

Config file

Optional. If viewkit.config.json exists in the working directory it is merged (CLI flags win). The wizard offers to save one.

{
  "urls": ["http://localhost:5173/?tenant=dev"],
  "only": "safari-view",
  "out": "qa-shots",
  "dark": false
}

Upgrading from 0.1

Everything is a real capture now: --real is implied and --wait no longer applies (both are accepted and ignored with a note, so old scripts keep running). The emulated profiles (desktop engines, browser skins, per-app WebViews) are gone — the per-app in-app browsers were all rendering the same system Safari view anyway, which is now the safari-view profile.