Here’s an odd little problem that’s led me to post my first question on SO. I am using wkhtmltopdf to convert an HTML document to a PDF as part of a Rails app. To do so, I am rendering the Rails web page to a static HTML file in a temp directory, copying a static header, footer and images to the same temp directory, then executing wkhtmltopdf using “system”.
This works perfectly in Development and Test environments. In my Staging env, it does not. I suspected permissions at first, but the first couple of parts of that process (creating the HTML static files and copying them to the directory) are working. I can run wkhtmltopdf from the command line in that temp directory and get the expected outcome. Finally, I ran wkhtmltopdf via both “system” and backticks through the Rails console in staging environment, and here’s what I get as output:
> `wkhtmltopdf --footer-html tmp/invoices/footer.html --header-html tmp/invoices/header.html -s Letter -L 0in -R 0in -T 0.5in -B 1in tmp/invoices/test.html tmp/invoices/this.pdf`
Loading pages (1/6)
QPainter::begin(): Returned false ] 10%
Error: Unable to write to destination
Error: Failed loading page http://tmp/invoices/test.html (sometimes it will work just to ignore this error with --load-error-handling ignore) => ""
Notice that last bit. I’m pointing to local files, but it’s looking for them via http. OK, I think, maybe I need to be explicit and feed it the file:// protocol so it doesn’t look for http. So I try this:
> system("wkhtmltopdf --footer-html file://Library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/intranet-staging/current/tmp/invoices/footer.html --header-html file://Library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/intranet-staging/current/tmp/invoices/header.html -s Letter -L 0in -R 0in -T 0.5in -B 1in file://Library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/intranet-staging/current/tmp/invoices/test.html file://Library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/intranet-staging/current/tmp/invoices/this.pdf")
Loading pages (1/6)
Error: Failed loading page file://library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/intranet-staging/current/tmp/invoices/test.html (sometimes it will work just to ignore this error with --load-error-handling ignore)
=> false
Notice that this one fails with a lowercase “l” on Library. What the heck? (And no, it doesn’t get any better with the recommendation to ignore the error with that switch.)
Any ideas? Is there a Rails or Ruby setting that would cause system commands to get rewritten? Is there an option I can add to wkhtmltopdf to make sure it loads from local file? I’m quite baffled. Thanks!
Take a look at the wicked_pdf gem.
You can add a PDF mime type and then whatever page you want pdf’d, just tack on a .pdf to the URL.
I am using this in prod and it works quite well.
No need to call wkhtmltopdf directly.