html-to-pdf-sample

This is a sample project to generate PDF from HTML in NodeJS using puppeteer and html-pdf for comparison

Running the project

• Install all dependencies

npm i

• Running the server

node serve-http port=8080

The command will run the server at http://localhost:8080. To change the port, for example using port 9000, pass port=9000 as argument.

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Generating PDF

There are 2 ways of PDF generation and each have the generated pdf included here as result sample using the included sample HTML file (email.html).

Use html-pdf (link)

To generate PDF using html-pdf. You can navigate to http://localhost:8080/pdf. This will stream the PDF result. To save the result into file, you can user http://localhost:8080/pdf?toTile=1 and it will generate the PDF file as html-pdf.pdf at the root of the project.

Use puppeteer (link)

To generate PDF using puppeteer you can run this command at the root of the project

node puppeteer port=8080 path=email.html

This will save the PDF as email.html_2023-09-13_025934.460.pdf (filename format: <path>_<date>_<time>.pdf)

• port should be the same as the deployed server port. Defaults to 8080.
• path is referring to actual file in the folder: email.html. This path is appended to the domain of deployed server, which by defaults is 'http://localhost:8080`.

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Using html-pdf under WSL2

I've run this lib on Windows ecosystem before and it was fine there out-of-the-box, but html-pdf have known issue when run under WSL.

First off, the zoom factor in UNIX system seems to be broken, causing generated PDF looks enlarged and not fit. Thus, generating PDF with this library requires playing with the zoom value until the desired output is reached.

Second, there is issue with SSL. The issue list in their github have different entries related to this issue and various workaround. Some requires actually changing system env value, others by changing prop value being passed to underlying library used by the lib.

INFO: html-pdf has been deprecated. And their github actually suggested its user to use puppeteer instead.

Installing puppeteer in WSL2 (Windows 11)

Same with html-pdf above, instaling puppeteer in Windows does not requires additional step to get it working. However, this lib also requires additional step when run from WSL2.

With puppeteer, I first need to install chrome headless package using the one included in the library under node_modules/ folder to get the correct version required by the lib to function correctly.

Then I need to install additional lib as below to get it working: (reference to [Cypress doc )

apt-get install libgtk2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libgbm-dev libnotify-dev libgconf-2-4 libnss3 libxss1 libasound2 libxtst6 xauth xvfb

There are also multiple entries about these issues in their github, so, do take a look there if you have issues with this lib. I might've missed a step or two here since I didn't document everything I did to make this lib work in my system.