Html2PDF

Html2PDF is a ready-to-use service for generating beautiful PDF from HTML and CSS. It is built using puppeteer project and uses headless Chromium to render pages and save them as PDF.

Ready-to-use

The service is ready-to-use and can be deployed from prepared container that is hosted on Docker Hub. Deploy it with:

# docker pull protodype/html2pdf:latest

Use it

The container accepts POST requests on listening port to / URI. Post data should be in JSON format and follow below structure:

{
  "html": "string",
  "css": "string",
  "name": "string"
}

Where html is an HTML content of page to be rendered, css is a raw CSS styles to be used for provided HTML and name is a filename to be inserted into headers (useful if you pass headers and response directly to client).

Response from service might be either success (HTTP code 200) which would be followed by appropriate headers for browser download of PDF file, or error (HTTP code 500) which would be followed by error message. Be sure to handle those appropriately.

Build yourself

You can use this code and provided Dockerfile to build the container yourself. To do that simple pull the latest code and run docker build:

# git clone  https://github.com/Protodype/html2pdf.git
# cd html2pdf
# docker built -t html2pdf .

Run it

The code in container accepts following ENV variables:

• LISTEN_HOST - which hostname should process listen on. Defaults to 0.0.0.0
• LISTEN_PORT - port the process will bind to within container. Defaults to 3000
• CHROMIUM_BIN - location of installed Chromium binary inside container. Defaults to /usr/bin/chromium-browser as default installation location in Alpine
• CHROMIUM_ARGS - arguments passed to Chromium on start. Defaults to --headless --disable-gpu --no-sandbox

Understand

By default the code in container runs as root and CHROMIUM_ARGS default values include --no-sandbox. This means that you should be well in control of HTML/JS passed to this service to mitigate any security issues. The reason behind this decision is that the Chromium requires specific privileges to be able to run, which in turn would require running container with specific key --cap-add=SYS_ADMIN, in which case it makes no difference whether to sandbox the process inside container with unprivileged user or not.

Contribute

This code is licensed under MIT license and welcomes all contributions.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to html5-to-pdf project for giving an idea how to build this service
• Thanks to puppeteer project for making it easy enough to generate nice looking PDFs with headless Chromium