What?

A small microservice that turns HTML into a PDF file. You can run this:

• on AWS Lambda
• with Docker
  • I didn’t bother making a Dockerfile though, since I didn’t need it. PR welcome!
• as a standalone binary

There also exists a small client library for Go

Security

While we’re confident in this project’s code, ultimately this is a wrapper to wkhtmltopdf, and thus
you should be aware of its status and its
security considerations:

• Do not use with untrusted HTML. Only render HTML that you control.
• whtmltopdf uses QtWebKit that hasn’t been updated since 2012
  • Qt abandoned QtWebkit in favor or QtWebEngine which uses Chromium internally

Testing

You can start a local server process with:

$ html2pdf server

Then call it from the client:

$ export HTML2PDF_TOKEN="doesntMatter" # optionally you can put the service behind authentication
$ html2pdf client-localhost '<h1>hello world</h1>' > out.pdf

Usage from curl is also simple:

$ curl -d '{"html_base64": "PGgxPmhlbGxvIHdvcmxkPC9oMT4="}' http://localhost/render > out.pdf

Prerequisites for dev/testing

$ apt install -y libxrender1 libxext6 libfontconfig1

(Fortunately, these exist in Lambda’s AMI)

Alternatives

• https://weasyprint.org/ (Python, self-implemented rendering)
• https://github.com/shouldbee/docker-html2pdf (go, wkhtmltox)
• https://github.com/carlescliment/html2pdf-service (PHP, wkhtmltopdf)
• https://github.com/spipu/html2pdf (PHP, self-implemented HTML rendering)

Support / contact

Basic support (no guarantees) for issues / feature requests via GitHub issues.

Paid support is available via function61.com/consulting

Contact options (email, Twitter etc.) at function61.com