I’m asking a very similar question to this one. I’m creating a pdf using wkhtmltopdf on an Ubuntu server in Django.
from tempfile import *
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
tempfile = gettempdir()+"/results.pdf"
papersize = 'Tabloid'
orientation = 'Landscape'
command_args = "wkhtmltopdf -O %s -s %s -T 0 -R 0 -B 0 -L 0 http://pdfurl %s" %(orientation, papersize, tempfile)
popen = Popen(command_args, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
pdf_contents = popen.stdout().read()
popen.terminate()
popen.wait()
response = HttpResponse(pdf_contents, mimetype='application/pdf')
return response
This gives me a “no such file or directory” error on the popen = Popen… line. So I changed that line to
popen = Popen(["sh", "-c", command_args], stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
and now I get a “‘file’ object is not callable” error on the pdf_contents =… line.
I’ve also tried adding .communicate() to the popen =… line but I can’t seem to locate the pdf output that way. I should add that typing the command_args line into the command line creates a pdf just fine. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Your first version fails because python does not know where wkhtmltopdf is located. Python will not check your path for that. Your second version passes the command to a shell which takes care of that. You achieve the same effect by passing a shell=True argument.
The second problem (as others have noted) is that you call stdout() when you shouldn’t.
The third problem is that your wkhtmltopdf command is wrong. You are doing:
Instead you should pass
That way wkhtmltopdf will write the output to standard output and you can read it. If you pass another – as the source, you can send the html over the standard input.