// the find
typicode/tlapse
📷 Create a timelapse of your web development... or just automatically take screenshots of your hard work ;)
tlapse is a tiny CLI that takes periodic screenshots of a local dev server using Puppeteer and saves them to disk. The intended use case is assembling them into a timelapse video of your build process. It's a toy utility from typicode, the json-server author.
The implementation is minimal — two files, no abstraction overhead. Puppeteer gives you real browser rendering so screenshots look exactly like the browser. Zero config to get started; the defaults are sensible and the npm-run-all parallel scripts pattern shown in the README is clean.
Abandoned since 2018 — Puppeteer's API has broken compatibility multiple times since then and almost certainly won't install cleanly today without version pinning. The 60-fork count versus 2000 stars suggests most people starred it as a curiosity and never shipped it. There's no built-in way to stitch the screenshots into an actual video; that step is left entirely to you. The whole thing is ~50 lines, which is fine, but means you're also on your own for anything beyond the happy path.