Question

This is my code:

$url = escapeshellarg("http://www.mysite.com");
$command = shell_exec("xvfb-run -a -s '-screen 0 640x480x16' wkhtmltopdf --dpi 300  --page-size A4 $url /srv/www/mysite/public_html/tmp_pdf.pdf");
$str = file_get_contents("/srv/www/mysite/public_html/tmp_pdf.pdf");
header('Content-Type: application/pdf');
header('Content-Length: '.strlen($str));
header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename="pdf.pdf"');
header('Cache-Control: private, max-age=0, must-revalidate');
header('Pragma: public');
ini_set('zlib.output_compression','0');
die($str);

In my bash shell (using Debian) the command

shell_exec(“xvfb-run -a -s ‘-screen 0 640x480x16’ wkhtmltopdf –dpi
300 –page-size A4 html://www.mysite.com /srv/www/mysite/public_html/tmp_pdf.pdf

works and it generates a pdf in the desired location but when i excecute the command in php nothing gets created and i’m returned to a null pdf file (because it doesn’t exist).
Can someone help me figure what is wrong?

Answer 1

The problem was that Apache server doesn’t have write access to the folder i’ve tried to write the pdf into (which is /srv/www/mysite/public_html/ in my example).

So i simply changed the folder location to /tmp (where everyone has write permissions) and now it works. The corrected code is:

$url = escapeshellarg("http://www.mysite.com");
$command = shell_exec("xvfb-run -a -s '-screen 0 640x480x16' wkhtmltopdf --dpi 300  --page-size A4 $url /tmp/tmp_pdf.pdf");
$str = file_get_contents("/tmp/tmp_pdf.pdf");
header('Content-Type: application/pdf');
header('Content-Length: '.strlen($str));
header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename="pdf.pdf"');
header('Cache-Control: private, max-age=0, must-revalidate');
header('Pragma: public');
ini_set('zlib.output_compression','0');
die($str);