URL-to-PDF Microservice

Web page PDF rendering done right. Self-hosted service for rendering receipts, invoices, or any content.

Microbox repackage alvarcarto's awesome url-to-pdf-api from the latest source and make it into a solid and easy-to-use docker image.

Image Size

266MB (smaller than alpine chromium image size 311MB)

Launch URL-to-PDF service

# URL-to-PDF microservice will listen at container port 80
docker run -d --name url2pdf -p 80:80 microbox/node-url-to-pdf-api

Use URL-to-PDF service

# find ip of docker container
export URL2PDF=`docker inspect -f '{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}' url2pdf`
# call api and download rendered pdf file
wget http://$URL2PDF/api/render?url=https://github.com -O github.pdf

Install extra fonts

When text is rendered by a computer, sometimes characters are displayed as 口 a.k.a “tofu”. They are little boxes to indicate your device doesn’t have a font to display the text.

The answer to “tofu” is following:

docker exec -it url2pdf /bin/bash
apt-get update
apt-get install -yq fonts-symbola      # 🙄🙄🙄
apt-get install -yq fonts-noto-cjk     # 囍, 언문, にほんご
apt-get install -yq fonts-ocr-b        # PASSPORT FONT

“no more tofu” !!!

Upgrade to a newer version

docker stop url2pdf
docker rm url2pdf
docker pull microbox/node-url-to-pdf-api
docker run -d --name url2pdf -p 80:80 microbox/node-url-to-pdf-api

Name

microbox/node-url-to-pdf-api

Version

1.0.0

Components

url-to-pdf-api 1.0.0
nodejs 8.9.0
puppeteer 0.11.0
chromium headless shell 63.0.3205.0

TODO

Reduce image size from ~1.2GB to ~600MB (actual size 548MB)
Reduce image size from ~548MB to ~350MB (actual size 286MB)

microbox / node-url-to-pdf-api