HTML to PDF Web Service

A WSGI web service for rendering HTML to PDF using wkhtmltopdf.

This work was inspired by https://github.com/openlabs/docker-wkhtmltopdf

TODO

• Add the javascript client
• Add a routing system
• Use URL params to generate wkhtmltopdf cmd-line options
• Add a cache system
• Add a Procfile and .buildpack for a better Heroku compatibility
• Add an auth system

Running the Service localy

1. Install python3 (virtualenv recommendend)

2. Install wkhtmltopdf here

3. Install dependencies:

   pip3 install -r requirements.txt
   

   on mac change the line 82 on app.py from

   return ['/usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf.sh', '-q', '-d', '300', '-s', 'A4', '-', '-']
   

   to

   return ['wkhtmltopdf', '-q', '-d', '300', '-s', 'A4', '-', '-']
   

4. Run server:

   python3 app.py
   

The development server listens on port 5000.

Using the Service

The web service accepts an HTML document as the "html" and "filename" parameter in the body of a URL-encoded web form POST request and responds with the rendered PDF. For example:

curl -d html='<p>Hello world!</p>' -d filename='test.pdf' http://localhost:5000 > output.pdf

An HTML file can also be included as multipart form data, for example:

cat sample.html | curl -F html=@- http://localhost:5000 > output.pdf

Running as Docker Container

To run the service as a Docker container with compose:

docker-compose up -d

Or build it and run it manually:

docker build -t printer-webservice .

docker run -p 5000:8080 printer-webservice