Run a Restlet webserver to generate PDFs from HTML, using phantom.js
Inspired from html2pdf.it
Make sure to have phantom.js installed
$ brew install phantom
# or
$ npm i -g phantomjs-prebuilt
$ npm rebuildStart the webserver
$ npm start
# or
$ grunt run # will watch for changes and keep the server aliveTo run it on production set the environment
$ NODE_ENV=production npm startYou can also pipe the logs (pretty printed) with bunyan
$ npm start | bunyan -o short
> [email protected] start /Users/nicola/dev/src/sphere-express-pdf
> node ./lib/app.js
11:02:04.039Z INFO sphere-express-pdf: Starting express application on port 3999 (development)
11:02:04.260Z INFO sphere-express-pdf: Listening for HTTP on http://localhost:3999
...The webserver started by express.js offers some JSON endpoints to work with PDFs. There are 2 basic principles regarding the endpoints:
POSTsome data which will be used to generate a PDFGETthe generated PDF in different ways
// defaults
{
"paperSize": {
"format": "A4", // possible values ['A3', 'A4', 'A5', 'Legal', 'Letter', 'Tabloid']
"orientation": "portrait", // possible values ['portrait', 'landscape']
"border": "1cm", // possible units ['mm', 'cm', 'in', 'px']
},
"content": "", // an HTML string with Handlebars template syntax
"context": {}, // a JSON object used to pass as context in the template
"download": false // true if the url link should trigger a PDF download, otherwise it will be rendered in the browser
}Will generate a PDF based on the given payload data and returns a JSON with a
link to the PDF.
Note that the link will expire after some time
// response
{
status: 200,
expires_in: '',
file: '1234567890.pdf',
url: 'http://localhost:3999/api/pdf/render/1234567890.pdf'
}Will generate a PDF based on the given payload data and render it in the browser
Will generate a PDF based on the given payload data and download it
Will render in the browser the generated PDF, if the token is still valid
Will download the generated PDF, if the token is still valid
{
"paperSize": {
"format": "A4",
"orientation": "portrait",
"border": "1cm",
},
"content": "
<html>
<head>
<meta charset=\"utf-8\">
<title>A PDF page</title>
<style type=\"text/css\">
body { font-family: \"Helvetica New\", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; }
h1 { text-transform: uppercase; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>{{title}}</h1>
<h2>{{formatDate createdAt}}</h2>
</body>
</html>
",
"context": {
"title": "Hello world",
"createdAt": "2014-01-20T19:18:42.940Z"
},
"download": false
}By default PDFs are stored into ./tmp folder but are not removed automatically.
There is a clean.sh script available that checks for expired PDFs (30min) and optionally remove them.
# check
$ ./bin/clean.sh
Found 3 expired PDFs
1395745335088-e97e7060da8196e1a58016637f86f80c385546edbc30f8540a8bdd8d99fcc4de.pdf
1395745341238-b5712ca71084f0690f5183f30de752c97b04891d3e22106ee1ecccf2218347ae.pdf
1395745341256-38eaa42514c503c64034249e239ad1a76be227af2c0d6573f6d759f96c303850.pdf
To remove the expired files pass the option -d
# check and remove
$ ./bin/clean.sh -d
Found 3 expired PDFs
Removing 1395745335088-e97e7060da8196e1a58016637f86f80c385546edbc30f8540a8bdd8d99fcc4de.pdf...done!
Removing 1395745341238-b5712ca71084f0690f5183f30de752c97b04891d3e22106ee1ecccf2218347ae.pdf...done!
Removing 1395745341256-38eaa42514c503c64034249e239ad1a76be227af2c0d6573f6d759f96c303850.pdf...done!You can setup a cronjob to have this automatically executed
$ crontab -e
*/5 * * * * /path/to/script/clean.shIn lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your code using Grunt. More info here
Copyright (c) 2014 Nicola Molinari Licensed under the MIT license.